My first store-bought computer was also a KIM-1. I had wanted a computer for years, always looking at advertisements in magazines, and subscribing eventually to BYTE. I remember going together with my father to a computer store (on Long Island) to look around. I think it was a second-floor showroom which was not very big -- maybe over other stores or in a house? I remember seeing some kind of computer there on a table with a terminal and a disk drive comping PASCAL or something like that. The KIM-1 was probably the cheapest thing there -- sitting in a display case by the cash register.
My father and I soldered a power supply together for it. I seem to remember saving longer programs to cassette tape.
Before the KIM, I had built circuits from logic ICs from RadioShack, and before those I had built circuits from discarded lights and switches my father had brought home from work. I had also haunted RadioShacks to play with the TRS-80s there -- and learned a lot by doing the exercises using pencil in a TRS-80 tutorial guide "Users Manual for Level 1". https://archive.org/details/Le...
I was lucky that a high school teacher also had a computer company selling educational computers. He would loan me PETS for a time I would write some software for or fix up or do other things with. One time he loaned me an Apple II for a couple days -- but that is all I ever did with one of those. Our high school (in the late 1970s) also was part of a Long Island BOCES timesharing group so we could dial-in from school (or later home on a PET) to a PDP-10 and run stuff there (not that I understood that much of what was going on the PDP-10 back then).
I sold the KIM-1 (sigh) to get money to buy my own PET from that teacher, and then got a printer and a dual floppy disk drive (forgoing all my future allowance to pay for it). Overlapping the PET I got a VIC (which I wrote a video game for which helped pay for college) and then a C64. I really liked Forth cartridges I got for the VIC and C64. I made an interface box so a PET, VIC, or C64 could control relays and extra multiplexed I/O lines (binary, A/D, and D/A). I interfaced that to a Battle Iron Claw robot from RadioShack I used in my undergraduate AI research
Eventually, I got a couple of embedded 6811-based Forth computers for fun -- I used them to radio control a Petster robot cat. Later I got a (Panasonic?) portable with a micro-tape drive I ended up returning at my manager's suggestion when the lab I was working at got a portable 8086 computer he let me take home (still wish I had kept the other laptop which was surprisingly good), then a Z88 portable, and finally my first 80386 IBM PC from Gateway I needed for a a computer contracting job.
After that was bunch of other PCs and Macs, Newtons , a Palm Pilot, a couple handheld Linux devices, a couple of OLPCs, and so on -- into the current days of Chromebooks, Arduinos, Raspberry Pi, OpenWRT-powered routers, and of course PC & Mac laptops.
Might have missed something or other in there.
Frankly, I no longer know exactly how many computers I own.:-)
The KIM-1 It was a big mystery to me at first. I had gotten an assembly language programming book but did not really understand it. It took quite a while to "click" and I'm not sure it ever really did until I later did assembly using a PET -- both to Peek and Poke and to run a macro assembler on the PET. But the KIM-1 set me up well to understand the PET quickly -- as well as a "Cardiac" cardboard computer we used in high school.
So, I can credit starting with a KIM-1 as teaching me a lot about the fundamentals of computing which has helped me throughout my career -- especially having confidence I can understand systems all the way to the metal (in theory). Thanks, Dad!!!
Sadly, my own kid has little interest in the low-level details of computers. Nowadays, pre-made applications can do so m
Sal Khan says it won't be right for everyone, but if you are motivated, the "seat time" as a "passive learner" in large lecture courses is mostly wasted time compared to being an "active learner" working through problem sets. He says there that skipping classes was how he and others at MIT were able to take double the normal course load and graduate with high grades and multiple degrees. See: https://books.google.com/books...
So, in that sense, it might not be surprising or an indictment of college that the GP AC poster was able to miss all the 8am classes for a course and still pass it -- if they did the assignments and otherwise read the text book or other readings and such.
Of course, while class skipping may work for large lecture courses, it may be more problematical for the best sort of small seminar courses where a lot of active participation goes on in class as discussion and is part of the learning process.
So, without knowing the class and what the GP AC did to pass it, it it hard to generalize about college.
That said, you might like these links I put together almost a decade ago on problems with current schooling practices and various alternatives:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")" https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
Part of something I posted in 2000 to Doug Engelbart's "Unifinshed Revolution II" colloquium touching on corporations as "AIs": http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
========= machine intelligence is already here ========= I personally think machine evolution is unstoppable, and the best hope for humanity is the noble cowardice of creating refugia and trying, like the duckweed, to create human (and other) life faster than other forces can destroy it.
Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component -- in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought". http://www.rpi.edu/~winner/
You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt" their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival. These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more resilient. People forget that corporate charters used to be routinely revoked for behavior outside the immediate public good, and that corporations were not considered persons until around 1886 (that decision perhaps being the first major example of a machine using the political/social process of its own ends). http://www.adbusters.org/magaz...
Corporate charters are granted supposedly because society believe it is in the best interest of *society* for corporations to exist. But, when was the last time people were able to pull the "charter" plug on a corporation not acting in the public interest? It's hard, and it will get harder when corporations don't need people to run themselves. http://www.adbusters.org/magaz... http://www.adbusters.org/campa...
I'm not saying the people in corporations are evil -- just that they often have very limited choices of actions. If a corporate CEOs do not deliver short term profits they are removed, no matter what they were trying to do. Obviously there are exceptions for a while -- William C. Norris of Control Data was one of them, but in general, the exception proves the rule. Fortunately though, even in the worst machines (like in WWII Germany) there were individuals who did what they could to make them more humane ("Schindler's List" being an example).
Look at how much William C. Norris http://www.neii.com/wnorris.ht... of Control Data got ridiculed in the 1970s for suggesting the then radical notion that "business exists to meet society's unmet needs". Yet his pioneering efforts in education, employee assistance plans, on-site daycare, urban renewal, and socially-responsible investing are in part what made Minneapolis/St.Paul the great area it is today. Such efforts are now being duplicated to an extent by other companies. Even the company that squashed CDC in the mid 1980s (IBM) has adopted some of those policies and directions. So corporations can adapt when they feel the need.
Obviously, corporations are not all powerful. The world still has some individuals who have wealth to equal major corporations. There are several governments that are as powerful or more so than major corporations. Individuals in corporations can make persuasive pitches about their future directions, and individuals with controlling shares may be able to influence what a corporation does (as far as the market allows). In the long run, many corporations are trying to coexist w
It runs the world by printing out business letters (and checks) that hire people to expand itself.
https://www.worldswithoutend.c... "Chester W. Chester IV, sole surviving heir of eccentric millionaire-inventor Chester W. Chester I, has entered into his inheritance: a semi-moribund circus; a white elephant of a run-down neo-Victorian mansion furnished with such hot items as TV sets shaped like crouching vultures; the old gentleman's final invention, a mammoth computer whose sole value seems to be as scrap metal; and one more thing--a million credits in back taxes. Either he comes up with the million credits, or it's up-the-river for Chester for a long, long time. That's why Chester is desperate enough to use the Generalized Nonlinear Extrapolator (Genie for short) to perpetrate one of the biggest entertainment scams of all time--The Great Time Machine Hoax."
I enjoyed that novel a lot and read it multiple times -- especially for the aspects of learning and training to become a more capable person (if maybe not a wiser and more compassionate one depending what you study).
It does take people to advocate for ideas, but the time usually has to be right too.
Reminds me of Antonio Gramsci's comments on economic change: http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-g... "Gramsci was concerned to eradicate economic determinism from Marxism and to develop its explanatory power with respect to superstructural institutions. So, he held that: * Class struggle must always involve ideas and ideologies, ideas that would make the revolution and also that would prevent it; * He stressed the role performed by human agency in historical change: economic crises by themselves would not subvert capitalism; * Gramsci was more "dialectic" than "deterministic": he tried to build a theory which recognised the autonomy, independence and importance of culture and ideology."
And in Antonio Gramsci's own words from there: "A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts... form the terrain of the 'conjunctural' and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise.... Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of an elite of intellectuals. A human mass does not 'distinguish' itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself: and there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is without organisers and leaders... But the process of creating intellectuals is long and difficult, full of contradictions, advances and retreats, dispersal and regrouping, in which the loyalty of the masses is often sorely tried.... So one could say that each one of us changes himself, modifies himself to the extent that he changes the complex relations of which he is the hub. In this sense the real philosopher is, and cannot be other than, the politician, the active man who modifies the environment, understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each of us enters to take part in....."
"There won't be any jobs for machinists or assemblers. There won't be jobs for anyone. There won't be anyone working except billionaire Bezos telling you to buy shit from robots. When you can't afford to buy, the economy won't need you anymore..."
I made this parable in 2010 that is about a world that develops along those lines: "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income " https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As I wrote here: http://web.archive.org/web/201... "Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [tabulators] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
I loved your Chronicles! https://www.amazon.com/Chronic... "In the distant future mankind creates sentient cybertanks patterned on the human brain to help fight their alien enemies. Then, inexplicably, the humans vanished. They just went away. All that is left of the human empire are the cybertanks who, in their own way, keep the human civilization alive. With an intelligence based on the human psyche, the cybertanks continue to defend human space, but also perform scientific research, create art, form committees and ponder the universe. These are the stories of one of the first cybertanks, known to his friends as âoeOld Guy.â He has outlived most of his peers, and has had a wealth of experiences over his long life, but he is starting to slowly become obsolete. Join him and his comrades Double-Wide, Whiffle-Bat, Smoking Hole, Mondocat, and Bob, as they live and love and fight alien enemies such as the deadly Fructoids, the Yllg, and the fiendish Amok."
And I also liked the other three novels you wrote about your adventures too (including one about when a backup copy of your program was activated back on Earth)!
Sorry, I don't think you get the level of integration possibly by the Mithril/TypeScript combo and how well it supports refactoring and debugging compared to coding big chunks of your application in ad hoc templating systems like JSX. And that just gets even better when you use something like Tachyons.js for CSS. When everything is TypeScript (or JavaScript), a programmer can use standard tools to do everything instead of hitting arbitrary boundaries where things work differently when you run into template issues. For example, how does an IDE know how to refactor JSX? Or how do you set break points in JSX? Or how do you parameterize the generation of JSX? There may be answers to those three questions, but they are non-obvious.
There is a huge difference between progressive enhancement of one page of HTML from the 2000s and the idea of writing a complex cross-platform application with 100s of pages that just happens to run in a browser and just happens to use the DOM and just happens to use a JavaScript VM.
Mithril has its warts (the latest version fixes a bunch of them) but overall technically (one can debate community size and its implication) Mithril is still better than most everything else I've seen for SPAs -- except maybe Elm but that is a bigger leap).
Thanks for asking. Participatory narrative inquiry is an approach in which groups of people participate in gathering and working with raw stories of personal experience in order to make sense of complex situations for better decision making. Essentially, the NarraFirma app leads someone step-by-step through a process of story gathering, sensemaking from those stories, and possibly intervention based on those results. That process is defined in a 700 page textbook my wife wrote: http://workingwithstories.org/
Just be patient; as explained on the page, a big project with thousands of records takes about ten seconds to load (and then runs quickly using client-side data). An empty project loads almost instantly.
HTML is a useful way of encoding static documents -- but it does not belong in a single-page application in my opinion. Stuff like JSX or Angular2 templates takes a standard (HTML) and makes adhoc changes -- which is a bad thing to do to a standard!
Mithril does the right thing by generating DOM from real programming code. If you use Mithril from TypeScript like I do, all that DOM-generating code is easily refactorable using an IDE just like any other code.
If you also use Tachyons.js or similar for CSS, you can also do styling in the same file -- like any standard development system in the past (like Java or Python or Smalltalk).
It's really sad that JavaScript developers are forced to be less productive their entire careers and have ugly lumps of junk in the middle of their source code just in case some "designer" might want to spend an hour playing with HTML and CSS in the application.
Ask a Java programmer if they want to code UIs that way -- with three files for every UI page written in three different languages -- three files that most IDEs can't even connect together for navigation and semantic search and refactoring.
From the article: "The gasoline lead story has another virtue too: It's the only hypothesis that persuasively explains both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and its fall beginning in the '90s. Two other theories -- the baby boom demographic bulge and the drug explosion of the '60 -- at least have the potential to explain both, but neither one fully fits the known data. Only gasoline lead, with its dramatic rise and fall following World War II, can explain the equally dramatic rise and fall in violent crime."
Yes, it's always good to be cautious about correlations and what they prove. But it is also widely accepted that lead is harmful.
http://www.motherjones.com/env... "So this is the choice before us: We can either attack crime at its root by getting rid of the remaining lead in our environment, or we can continue our current policy of waiting 20 years and then locking up all the lead-poisoned kids who have turned into criminals."
"Odds are, people who use advanced features are more likely to turn data harvesting off. Thus making those metrics questionable. Then again, anyone who is opposed to being monitored is not part of the Google's target audience."
Sounds likely, AC. But here is Google's mistake. There is a sort of hierarchy or pyramid of users for many application. In rough percentages: * 1% of users might become superusers making plugins and doing all sorts of fancy things with an application. * 10% of users might become knowledgeable about what you can do with an app and provide support and encouragement for their friends (and also rely on the 1% for support and new features like plugins). * 89% as all the rest just use the app and ask the 11% for help.
If you decide to design your platform for the 89%, you alienate all the people up the pyramid who provide free support and evangelism for the product and who guide the product in new directions. As Eric von Hippel at MIT has done studies showing that most (like 80%) of innovations are customer suggestions; so, you also cut yourself off from customer-led innovation.
I'm really going to miss "close tabs to the right" which I use frequently (and yes I have telemetry turned off too). If there is not a plugin possible for that, removing that feature is definitely going to reduce my liking of Chrome (which I use on a Chromebook). Now, maybe by itself that one change won't make me abandon Chrome (as if there are many great alternatives with Firefox/Mozilla fiascos) -- but, add up enough of these misguided decisions, and the odds will continue to change.
I definitely do not want to see a future world of only proprietary intellectual property where basically everything I want to do requires agreeing to endless licenses and royalty payments, such as described in "right-to-read". My wife and I released a six person-year effort under the GPL (a garden simulator application) around 1997... so I am obviously sympathetic to encouraging free sharing of some information and allowing derived works of some things.
However, on a practical basis, living in our society as it is right now, any software developer is going to handle lots of packets of information from emails to applications to program modules under a variety of explicit or implied licenses. If a developer is going to do this in a way that makes his or her work most useful to the community (under the terms he or she so chooses), proper attention must be given to the licensing status of all works received and distributed, especially those that form the basis for new derived works to be distributed. Note that even in the case of purely GPL'd works, one still needs to know that a user contributing an extension to a GPL'd work was the original author and/or he or she has permission to distribute the patch (if say an employer owns all the contributor's work).
My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a role in easing this required "due diligence"... license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is concerned)?... Usually license management tools (e.g. for music or DVDs) are thought of as keeping the end user from doing something they might wish to with content they have paid for. Does it make sense as well to look at license management tools from the perspective of allowing (non-technical, non-lawyer) casual users to do things they otherwise might not be legally sure they can do? Similarly, would such tools help someone filter out proprietary content with licenses he or she does not approve of (and would this provide incentives for artists to release free versions if they want to reach people through those filters)? And most of all, would such tools allow creative people to be more certain that they could legally use certain freely licensed materials found on the internet in making derived works? Would this provide a legitimate defense of due diligence to minimize copyright infringement suit costs (or reduce related liability insurance costs)?
For example, when you get an email it could come with a machine-readable license (e.g. "redistribution OK in entirety", "for your eyes only", "open content", "GPL"). Likewise, what if every file or zip archive came with a specific machine-readable license? In effect, this would make the license a fundamental part of the work.
In part, you may think, perhaps correctly, this it the "right-to-read" nightmare. Such information could be used to prevent you from making copies of things you might want to copy (legally or not) under some notion of "fair use"... if the system enforced the license by preventing say you forwarding or quoting an email that comes in with a license of "for your eyes only" or with no explicit license at all. Perhaps the feeling that copy protection systems will prevent fair use underlies much of the resistance to such automation. It is not my point in this note to advocate either for or against the enforcement of licenses by the end user's system. Obviously though, enforcement would certainly be made easier by machine-readable licenses, and this is a problematical issue as far as "fair use" is concerned.
On the other hand, license management tools might force everyone to be explicit about licenses for thing
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
http://pdfernhout.net/on-fundi... "Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?"
And also, earlier, this to Ray Kurzweil in 2000: http://heybryan.org/fernhout/k... "... It will be difficult for you to change your opinion on this because you have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. You were making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in your book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt.
Still, you are a bright guy. If you study ecology and evolution in more detail, I think you may change your conclusion, or at least admit the significant probability of a bad outcome, and that we should plan accordingly.
If you do change your opinion in the future, and wish to fund work related to helping ensure humanity survives the birth of the digital realm, please remember me.
MOSH to the end I guess!"
The Bayh-Dole Act is a big part of that disaster (letting universities privatize gains and tightly control use of what they make an with public funds rather than insist publicly funded research goes into the public domain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...
Anyway, I'm still trying to limp along making glacially slow progress doing free stuff (Twirlip/Pointrel/etc.) on GitHub in increasingly vanishing spare time... My latest small increment: "High Performance Organizations Reading List" https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Hi meta-monkey! I'm making a "meta" comment on the social-financial framework around battery (or any) science.:-)
Just look at the whole "cold fusion" or now "LENR / solid state fusion" controversy and fight over funding and recognition. The idea that a solid-state metal lattice can induce hydrogen atoms (on its surface, in a micro-crevice, or otherwise absorbed somehow) to behave differently than when hydrogen is in a gas is still heresy requiring immediate excommunication after vilification by a mob of virtue-signalling "disciplined minds" whose social standing and, worse, grant funding is threatened by the idea. http://lenrtoday.com/lenrexpla... http://www.infinite-energy.com... "In retrospect, I have concluded that much of the blame for the "cold fusion war" -- and it certainly has been just that -- stems from a vituperative campaign against the field with deep roots at MIT, specifically at the MIT Plasma Fusion Center. Not exclusively in that lab, however."
Ironically, about thirty years later: http://coldfusionnow.org/cold-... "The Cold Fusion 101: Introduction to Excess Power in Fleischmann-Pons Experiments course will run again on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) over the IAP winter break Tuesday through Friday Jan. 20-23, 2015."
So, that's a third option to either it works or it does not work -- whether it works or not, your science career gets trashed because you even talked about an idea, let alone seriously tried to do an experiment about it. And your career gets trashed because of the *politics* of science funding. Science is a human enterprise after all, and humans being humans...
Kudos to the kid saving his mom, but it is also kind of sad about how isolated and dependent on institutions and technology so many of us have become... So much so, we just take it for granted a four year old would have no neighbor or relative nearby to turn to.
Perhaps I was just lucky to grow up (lower-ish) middle class in a suburb in the 1960s with siblings, many stay-at-home moms as friendly neighbors all around, as well as lots of kids playing in the street. That seems to be a world that perhaps hardly exists anymore in the USA for any child... Other countries may be more likely to still have that kind of circumstance perhaps...
And more wealth seems to only make it worse -- see for example: "The Problem With Rich Kids" https://www.psychologytoday.co... "In a surprising switch, the offspring of the affluent today are more distressed than other youth. They show disturbingly high rates of substance use, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, cheating, and stealing. It gives a whole new meaning to having it all."
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... "Evolutionary psychologists have suggested, furthermore, that wealthy communities can, paradoxically, be among those most likely to engender feelings of friendlessness and isolation in their inhabitants. As Tooby and Cosmides (1996) argued, the most reliable evidence of genuine friendship is that of help offered during times of dire need: People tend never to forget the sacrifices of those who provide help during their darkest hours. Modern living conditions, however, present relatively few threats to physical well-being. Medical science has reduced several sources of disease, many hostile forces of nature have been controlled, and laws and police forces deter assault and murder. Ironically, therefore, the greater the availability of amenities of modern living in a community, the fewer are the occurrences of critical events that indicate to people which of their friends are truly engaged in their welfare and which are only fair-weather companions. This lack of critical assessment events, in turn, engenders lingering mistrustfulness despite the presence of apparently warm interactions (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996)....
Physical characteristics of wealthy suburban communities may also contribute to feelings of isolation. Houses in these communities are often set far apart with privacy of all ensured by long driveways, high hedges, and sprawling lawns (Weitzman, 2000; Wilson-Doenges, 2000). Neighbors are unlikely to casually bump into each other as they come and go in their communities, and children are unlikely to play on street corners. Paradoxically, once again, it is possible that the wealthiest neighborhoods are among the most vulnerable to low levels of cohesiveness and efficacy (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). When encountering an errant, disruptive child of the millionaire acquaintance next door, neighbors tend to be reluctant to intervene not only because of respect for others' privacy but also, more pragmatically, because of fears of litigation (e.g., Warner, 1991)."
It used to be we lived in tribes and then still close-knit communities...
Daniel Quinn proposes we try to go back to that way of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "New tribalists believe that the tribal model, though not absolutely "perfect," has obviously stood the test of time as the most successful social organization for humans, in alignment with natural selection (just as well as the hive model for bees, the pod model for whales, and the pack model for wolves). According to new tribalists, the tribe fulfills both an emotionally and organizationally stabilizing role in human li
He says there is a tradeoff between efficiency meeting old needs quickly) versus effectiveness (meeting new needs with flexibility & responsiveness).
DeMarco points out that it is precisely the middle management layer that needs some slack time the most to be able to innovate in ways that lead to organizational learning. But everyone needs slack time to take part in that too. IBM is likely going in the completely wrong direction if it is reeling people in to presumably over-schedule them even more.
I last worked for IBM in Research about sixteen years ago myself... The project I worked the most on was the IBM Personal Speech Assistant (a forerunner to Siri and such). The team was very proud that Lou asked for one for his office: http://liamcomerford.com/alpha...
But -- I had enough "slack" then (after a year of hard work) that when my then supervisor (his site above) went on a two week vacation, I build a speech activated display wall out of used ThinkPads which looked a lot like a Jeopardy board. (A coworker said it was a a good thing I was not in the lab when my supervisor first walked in after his vacation.:-) I always wonder though if years later that spark led to the idea of Watson being on Jeopardy?
Still think a conversational display wall is a good idea to pursue further. And I still want to make a programming language tailored to being edited easily via voice recognition. Of course IBM has long since sold off ViaVoice... And while there was some slack in Research then around 2000, I was told it was nothing like what was there in the 1970s and 1980s where a lot more creativity was possible. So, even then, these ideas were unlikely to be pursue-able.
And also around 2000, on teamwork at Research, one thing I heard at lunch was someone saying something like "We hire the top people from the most competitive schools and then wonder why they have trouble getting along.." There is a certain lack of diversity as well from such hiring practices.
I'm all for distributed systems, but for many big companies, mainframes still make a lot of economic sense: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/... "While some believe that smaller distributed servers provide the agility needed in today's fast-moving cognitive era, the IBM mainframe is the preferred solution for many of the world's most competitive businesses, including: 92 of the top 100 banks worldwide 70%+ of the world's largest retailers 23 of the world's 25 largest airlines"
And see also, on a smaller scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "IBM designed IBM i as a "turnkey" operating system, requiring little or no on-site attention from IT staff during normal operation. For example, IBM i has a built-in DB2 database which does not require separate installation. Disks are multiply redundant, and can be replaced on line without interrupting work. Hardware and software maintenance tasks are integrated. System administration has been wizard-driven for years, even before that term was defined. This automatic self-care policy goes so far as to automatically schedule all common system maintenance, detect many failures and even order spare parts and service automatically. Organizations using i sometimes have sticker shock when confronting the cost of system maintenance on other systems.[1]"
In general: "Why on Earth Is IBM Still Making Mainframes?" https://www.wired.com/2015/01/... "Business is more mobile than ever. Yet however lightweight those mobile devices feel in your pocket, they can still make good use of a big, powerful machine chugging away in a back room, not going anywhere."
Mainframes are also more than just hardware. Mainframes are in a sense a culture of 100% uptime and reliability.
That said, distributed computing continues to improve... And distributed computing culture continues to improve...
As to the original article, IBM is still shooting itself in the foot with this move away from supporting remote work... What IBM needs to be creative is not colocation but "slack" in the Tom DeMarco sense: https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G... "Why is it that today's superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth."
That was the great thing about IBM Research when I worked there around 2000 -- a bit of slack to be creative and good work/life balance. But, IBMers even then said the rest of IBM was not like Research...
Perhaps the opposite of: http://brilliantlightpower.com... "The SunCell was invented and engineered to harness the clean energy source from the reaction of the hydrogen atoms of water molecules to form a non-polluting product, lower-energy state hydrogen called "Hydrino" that is the dark matter of the universe wherein the energy release of H2O to Hydrino and oxygen is 100 times that of an equivalent amount of high-octane gasoline at an unprecedented high power density. The compact power is manifest as thousands of Sun equivalents that can be directly converted to electrical output using commercial concentrator photovoltaic cells."
Assuming hydrinos really exist...
But probably it is plain old chemistry...
AC, I like your idea of measuring the weight distribution in the battery in any case.
Slashdot Mirror
Great story of coming full-circle.
My first store-bought computer was also a KIM-1. I had wanted a computer for years, always looking at advertisements in magazines, and subscribing eventually to BYTE. I remember going together with my father to a computer store (on Long Island) to look around. I think it was a second-floor showroom which was not very big -- maybe over other stores or in a house? I remember seeing some kind of computer there on a table with a terminal and a disk drive comping PASCAL or something like that. The KIM-1 was probably the cheapest thing there -- sitting in a display case by the cash register.
My father and I soldered a power supply together for it. I seem to remember saving longer programs to cassette tape.
Before the KIM, I had built circuits from logic ICs from RadioShack, and before those I had built circuits from discarded lights and switches my father had brought home from work. I had also haunted RadioShacks to play with the TRS-80s there -- and learned a lot by doing the exercises using pencil in a TRS-80 tutorial guide "Users Manual for Level 1".
https://archive.org/details/Le...
I was lucky that a high school teacher also had a computer company selling educational computers. He would loan me PETS for a time I would write some software for or fix up or do other things with. One time he loaned me an Apple II for a couple days -- but that is all I ever did with one of those. Our high school (in the late 1970s) also was part of a Long Island BOCES timesharing group so we could dial-in from school (or later home on a PET) to a PDP-10 and run stuff there (not that I understood that much of what was going on the PDP-10 back then).
I sold the KIM-1 (sigh) to get money to buy my own PET from that teacher, and then got a printer and a dual floppy disk drive (forgoing all my future allowance to pay for it). Overlapping the PET I got a VIC (which I wrote a video game for which helped pay for college) and then a C64. I really liked Forth cartridges I got for the VIC and C64. I made an interface box so a PET, VIC, or C64 could control relays and extra multiplexed I/O lines (binary, A/D, and D/A). I interfaced that to a Battle Iron Claw robot from RadioShack I used in my undergraduate AI research
Eventually, I got a couple of embedded 6811-based Forth computers for fun -- I used them to radio control a Petster robot cat. Later I got a (Panasonic?) portable with a micro-tape drive I ended up returning at my manager's suggestion when the lab I was working at got a portable 8086 computer he let me take home (still wish I had kept the other laptop which was surprisingly good), then a Z88 portable, and finally my first 80386 IBM PC from Gateway I needed for a a computer contracting job.
After that was bunch of other PCs and Macs, Newtons , a Palm Pilot, a couple handheld Linux devices, a couple of OLPCs, and so on -- into the current days of Chromebooks, Arduinos, Raspberry Pi, OpenWRT-powered routers, and of course PC & Mac laptops.
Might have missed something or other in there.
Frankly, I no longer know exactly how many computers I own. :-)
The KIM-1 It was a big mystery to me at first. I had gotten an assembly language programming book but did not really understand it. It took quite a while to "click" and I'm not sure it ever really did until I later did assembly using a PET -- both to Peek and Poke and to run a macro assembler on the PET. But the KIM-1 set me up well to understand the PET quickly -- as well as a "Cardiac" cardboard computer we used in high school.
So, I can credit starting with a KIM-1 as teaching me a lot about the fundamentals of computing which has helped me throughout my career -- especially having confidence I can understand systems all the way to the metal (in theory). Thanks, Dad!!!
Sadly, my own kid has little interest in the low-level details of computers. Nowadays, pre-made applications can do so m
... as he explains in his "The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined" book: https://www.khanacademy.org/ab...
Sal Khan says it won't be right for everyone, but if you are motivated, the "seat time" as a "passive learner" in large lecture courses is mostly wasted time compared to being an "active learner" working through problem sets. He says there that skipping classes was how he and others at MIT were able to take double the normal course load and graduate with high grades and multiple degrees. See:
https://books.google.com/books...
So, in that sense, it might not be surprising or an indictment of college that the GP AC poster was able to miss all the 8am classes for a course and still pass it -- if they did the assignments and otherwise read the text book or other readings and such.
Of course, while class skipping may work for large lecture courses, it may be more problematical for the best sort of small seminar courses where a lot of active participation goes on in class as discussion and is part of the learning process.
So, without knowing the class and what the GP AC did to pass it, it it hard to generalize about college.
That said, you might like these links I put together almost a decade ago on problems with current schooling practices and various alternatives:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
Part of something I posted in 2000 to Doug Engelbart's "Unifinshed Revolution II" colloquium touching on corporations as "AIs":
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
========= machine intelligence is already here =========
I personally think machine evolution is unstoppable, and the best hope for humanity is the noble cowardice of creating refugia and trying, like the duckweed, to create human (and other) life faster than other forces can destroy it.
Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component -- in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought".
http://www.rpi.edu/~winner/
You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt" their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival. These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more resilient. People forget that corporate charters used to be routinely revoked for behavior outside the immediate public good, and that corporations were not considered persons until around 1886 (that decision perhaps being the first major example of a machine using the political/social process of its own ends).
http://www.adbusters.org/magaz...
Corporate charters are granted supposedly because society believe it is in the best interest of *society* for corporations to exist. But, when was the last time people were able to pull the "charter" plug on a corporation not acting in the public interest? It's hard, and it will get harder when corporations don't need people to run themselves.
http://www.adbusters.org/magaz...
http://www.adbusters.org/campa...
I'm not saying the people in corporations are evil -- just that they often have very limited choices of actions. If a corporate CEOs do not deliver short term profits they are removed, no matter what they were trying to do. Obviously there are exceptions for a while -- William C. Norris of Control Data was one of them, but in general, the exception proves the rule. Fortunately though, even in the worst machines (like in WWII Germany) there were individuals who did what they could to make them more humane ("Schindler's List" being an example).
Look at how much William C. Norris http://www.neii.com/wnorris.ht... of Control Data got ridiculed in the 1970s for suggesting the then radical notion that "business exists to meet society's unmet needs". Yet his pioneering efforts in education, employee assistance plans, on-site daycare, urban renewal, and socially-responsible investing are in part what made Minneapolis/St.Paul the great area it is today. Such efforts are now being duplicated to an extent by other companies. Even the company that squashed CDC in the mid 1980s (IBM) has adopted some of those policies and directions. So corporations can adapt when they feel the need.
Obviously, corporations are not all powerful. The world still has some individuals who have wealth to equal major corporations. There are several governments that are as powerful or more so than major corporations. Individuals in corporations can make persuasive pitches about their future directions, and individuals with controlling shares may be able to influence what a corporation does (as far as the market allows). In the long run, many corporations are trying to coexist w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It runs the world by printing out business letters (and checks) that hire people to expand itself.
https://www.worldswithoutend.c...
"Chester W. Chester IV, sole surviving heir of eccentric millionaire-inventor Chester W. Chester I, has entered into his inheritance: a semi-moribund circus; a white elephant of a run-down neo-Victorian mansion furnished with such hot items as TV sets shaped like crouching vultures; the old gentleman's final invention, a mammoth computer whose sole value seems to be as scrap metal; and one more thing--a million credits in back taxes. Either he comes up with the million credits, or it's up-the-river for Chester for a long, long time. That's why Chester is desperate enough to use the Generalized Nonlinear Extrapolator (Genie for short) to perpetrate one of the biggest entertainment scams of all time--The Great Time Machine Hoax."
I enjoyed that novel a lot and read it multiple times -- especially for the aspects of learning and training to become a more capable person (if maybe not a wiser and more compassionate one depending what you study).
It does take people to advocate for ideas, but the time usually has to be right too.
Reminds me of Antonio Gramsci's comments on economic change: http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-g...
"Gramsci was concerned to eradicate economic determinism from Marxism and to develop its explanatory power with respect to superstructural institutions. So, he held that:
* Class struggle must always involve ideas and ideologies, ideas that would make the revolution and also that would prevent it;
* He stressed the role performed by human agency in historical change: economic crises by themselves would not subvert capitalism;
* Gramsci was more "dialectic" than "deterministic": he tried to build a theory which recognised the autonomy, independence and importance of culture and ideology."
And in Antonio Gramsci's own words from there: ... form the terrain of the 'conjunctural' and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise. ... Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of an elite of intellectuals. A human mass does not 'distinguish' itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself: and there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is without organisers and leaders... But the process of creating intellectuals is long and difficult, full of contradictions, advances and retreats, dispersal and regrouping, in which the loyalty of the masses is often sorely tried. ... So one could say that each one of us changes himself, modifies himself to the extent that he changes the complex relations of which he is the hub. In this sense the real philosopher is, and cannot be other than, the politician, the active man who modifies the environment, understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each of us enters to take part in. ...."
"A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts
"There won't be any jobs for machinists or assemblers. There won't be jobs for anyone. There won't be anyone working except billionaire Bezos telling you to buy shit from robots. When you can't afford to buy, the economy won't need you anymore ..."
I made this parable in 2010 that is about a world that develops along those lines:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As I wrote here: http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [tabulators] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
I loved your Chronicles!
https://www.amazon.com/Chronic...
"In the distant future mankind creates sentient cybertanks patterned on the human brain to help fight their alien enemies. Then, inexplicably, the humans vanished. They just went away. All that is left of the human empire are the cybertanks who, in their own way, keep the human civilization alive. With an intelligence based on the human psyche, the cybertanks continue to defend human space, but also perform scientific research, create art, form committees and ponder the universe. These are the stories of one of the first cybertanks, known to his friends as âoeOld Guy.â He has outlived most of his peers, and has had a wealth of experiences over his long life, but he is starting to slowly become obsolete. Join him and his comrades Double-Wide, Whiffle-Bat, Smoking Hole, Mondocat, and Bob, as they live and love and fight alien enemies such as the deadly Fructoids, the Yllg, and the fiendish Amok."
And I also liked the other three novels you wrote about your adventures too (including one about when a backup copy of your program was activated back on Earth)!
Sorry, I don't think you get the level of integration possibly by the Mithril/TypeScript combo and how well it supports refactoring and debugging compared to coding big chunks of your application in ad hoc templating systems like JSX. And that just gets even better when you use something like Tachyons.js for CSS. When everything is TypeScript (or JavaScript), a programmer can use standard tools to do everything instead of hitting arbitrary boundaries where things work differently when you run into template issues. For example, how does an IDE know how to refactor JSX? Or how do you set break points in JSX? Or how do you parameterize the generation of JSX? There may be answers to those three questions, but they are non-obvious.
There is a huge difference between progressive enhancement of one page of HTML from the 2000s and the idea of writing a complex cross-platform application with 100s of pages that just happens to run in a browser and just happens to use the DOM and just happens to use a JavaScript VM.
Mithril has its warts (the latest version fixes a bunch of them) but overall technically (one can debate community size and its implication) Mithril is still better than most everything else I've seen for SPAs -- except maybe Elm but that is a bigger leap).
Thanks for asking. Participatory narrative inquiry is an approach in which groups of people participate in gathering and working with raw stories of personal experience in order to make sense of complex situations for better decision making. Essentially, the NarraFirma app leads someone step-by-step through a process of story gathering, sensemaking from those stories, and possibly intervention based on those results. That process is defined in a 700 page textbook my wife wrote: http://workingwithstories.org/
Just be patient; as explained on the page, a big project with thousands of records takes about ten seconds to load (and then runs quickly using client-side data). An empty project loads almost instantly.
HTML is a useful way of encoding static documents -- but it does not belong in a single-page application in my opinion. Stuff like JSX or Angular2 templates takes a standard (HTML) and makes adhoc changes -- which is a bad thing to do to a standard!
Mithril does the right thing by generating DOM from real programming code. If you use Mithril from TypeScript like I do, all that DOM-generating code is easily refactorable using an IDE just like any other code.
If you also use Tachyons.js or similar for CSS, you can also do styling in the same file -- like any standard development system in the past (like Java or Python or Smalltalk).
It's really sad that JavaScript developers are forced to be less productive their entire careers and have ugly lumps of junk in the middle of their source code just in case some "designer" might want to spend an hour playing with HTML and CSS in the application.
Ask a Java programmer if they want to code UIs that way -- with three files for every UI page written in three different languages -- three files that most IDEs can't even connect together for navigation and semantic search and refactoring.
My biggest Mithril app to date:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
https://narrafirma.com/try-nar...
It's really unfortunate some Slashdot editor saw fit to announce this on April Fools because it makes it less likely people will take is seriously.
Thanks for making me laugh! :-)
From the article: "The gasoline lead story has another virtue too: It's the only hypothesis that persuasively explains both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and its fall beginning in the '90s. Two other theories -- the baby boom demographic bulge and the drug explosion of the '60 -- at least have the potential to explain both, but neither one fully fits the known data. Only gasoline lead, with its dramatic rise and fall following World War II, can explain the equally dramatic rise and fall in violent crime."
Yes, it's always good to be cautious about correlations and what they prove. But it is also widely accepted that lead is harmful.
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
"So this is the choice before us: We can either attack crime at its root by getting rid of the remaining lead in our environment, or we can continue our current policy of waiting 20 years and then locking up all the lead-poisoned kids who have turned into criminals."
"Odds are, people who use advanced features are more likely to turn data harvesting off. Thus making those metrics questionable. Then again, anyone who is opposed to being monitored is not part of the Google's target audience."
Sounds likely, AC. But here is Google's mistake. There is a sort of hierarchy or pyramid of users for many application. In rough percentages:
* 1% of users might become superusers making plugins and doing all sorts of fancy things with an application.
* 10% of users might become knowledgeable about what you can do with an app and provide support and encouragement for their friends (and also rely on the 1% for support and new features like plugins).
* 89% as all the rest just use the app and ask the 11% for help.
If you decide to design your platform for the 89%, you alienate all the people up the pyramid who provide free support and evangelism for the product and who guide the product in new directions. As Eric von Hippel at MIT has done studies showing that most (like 80%) of innovations are customer suggestions; so, you also cut yourself off from customer-led innovation.
I'm really going to miss "close tabs to the right" which I use frequently (and yes I have telemetry turned off too). If there is not a plugin possible for that, removing that feature is definitely going to reduce my liking of Chrome (which I use on a Chromebook). Now, maybe by itself that one change won't make me abandon Chrome (as if there are many great alternatives with Firefox/Mozilla fiascos) -- but, add up enough of these misguided decisions, and the odds will continue to change.
From me in 2001 posted to gnu.misc.discuss: https://groups.google.com/d/ms...
I definitely do not want to see a future world of only proprietary ...
intellectual property where basically everything I want to do requires
agreeing to endless licenses and royalty payments, such as described in
"right-to-read". My wife and I released a six person-year effort under
the GPL (a garden simulator application) around 1997
so I am obviously sympathetic to encouraging free sharing of some
information and allowing derived works of some things.
However, on a practical basis, living in our society as it is right now,
any software developer is going to handle lots of packets of information
from emails to applications to program modules under a variety of
explicit or implied licenses. If a developer is going to do this in a
way that makes his or her work most useful to the community (under the
terms he or she so chooses), proper attention must be given to the
licensing status of all works received and distributed, especially those
that form the basis for new derived works to be distributed. Note that
even in the case of purely GPL'd works, one still needs to know that a
user contributing an extension to a GPL'd work was the original author
and/or he or she has permission to distribute the patch (if say an
employer owns all the contributor's work).
My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a ... ... Usually license management tools (e.g. for music or DVDs) are thought of
role in easing this required "due diligence"
license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is
concerned)?
as keeping the end user from doing something they might wish to with
content they have paid for. Does it make sense as well to look at
license management tools from the perspective of allowing
(non-technical, non-lawyer) casual users to do things they otherwise
might not be legally sure they can do? Similarly, would such tools help
someone filter out proprietary content with licenses he or she does not
approve of (and would this provide incentives for artists to release
free versions if they want to reach people through those filters)? And
most of all, would such tools allow creative people to be more certain
that they could legally use certain freely licensed materials found on
the internet in making derived works? Would this provide a legitimate
defense of due diligence to minimize copyright infringement suit costs
(or reduce related liability insurance costs)?
For example, when you get an email it could come with a machine-readable
license (e.g. "redistribution OK in entirety", "for your eyes only",
"open content", "GPL"). Likewise, what if every file or zip archive came
with a specific machine-readable license? In effect, this would make the
license a fundamental part of the work.
In part, you may think, perhaps correctly, this it the "right-to-read" ...
nightmare. Such information could be used to prevent you from making
copies of things you might want to copy (legally or not) under some
notion of "fair use"
if the system enforced the license by preventing say you forwarding or
quoting an email that comes in with a license of "for your eyes only" or
with no explicit license at all. Perhaps the feeling that copy
protection systems will prevent fair use underlies much of the
resistance to such automation. It is not my point in this note to
advocate either for or against the enforcement of licenses by the end
user's system. Obviously though, enforcement would certainly be made
easier by machine-readable licenses, and this is a problematical issue
as far as "fair use" is concerned.
On the other hand, license management tools might force everyone to be
explicit about licenses for thing
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Longer version: http://pdfernhout.net/on-fundi...
http://pdfernhout.net/on-fundi...
"Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?"
And also, earlier, this to Ray Kurzweil in 2000:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/k...
"... It will be difficult for you to change your opinion on this because you have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. You were making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in your book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt.
Still, you are a bright guy. If you study ecology and evolution in more detail, I think you may change your conclusion, or at least admit the significant probability of a bad outcome, and that we should plan
accordingly.
If you do change your opinion in the future, and wish to fund work related to helping ensure humanity survives the birth of the digital realm, please remember me.
MOSH to the end I guess!"
The Bayh-Dole Act is a big part of that disaster (letting universities privatize gains and tightly control use of what they make an with public funds rather than insist publicly funded research goes into the public domain):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...
Anyway, I'm still trying to limp along making glacially slow progress doing free stuff (Twirlip/Pointrel/etc.) on GitHub in increasingly vanishing spare time... My latest small increment:
"High Performance Organizations Reading List"
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Hi meta-monkey! I'm making a "meta" comment on the social-financial framework around battery (or any) science. :-)
Just look at the whole "cold fusion" or now "LENR / solid state fusion" controversy and fight over funding and recognition. The idea that a solid-state metal lattice can induce hydrogen atoms (on its surface, in a micro-crevice, or otherwise absorbed somehow) to behave differently than when hydrogen is in a gas is still heresy requiring immediate excommunication after vilification by a mob of virtue-signalling "disciplined minds" whose social standing and, worse, grant funding is threatened by the idea.
http://lenrtoday.com/lenrexpla...
http://www.infinite-energy.com...
"In retrospect, I have concluded that much of the blame for the "cold fusion war" -- and it certainly has been just that -- stems from a vituperative campaign against the field with deep roots at MIT, specifically at the MIT Plasma Fusion Center. Not exclusively in that lab, however."
Ironically, about thirty years later:
http://coldfusionnow.org/cold-...
"The Cold Fusion 101: Introduction to Excess Power in Fleischmann-Pons Experiments course will run again on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) over the IAP winter break Tuesday through Friday Jan. 20-23, 2015."
Fusion via cavitation also falls into that category of heresy (but may be emerging):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://atom-ecology.russgeorge...
As does power via hydrinos (which may also just be LENR in disguise):
http://brilliantlightpower.com...
So, that's a third option to either it works or it does not work -- whether it works or not, your science career gets trashed because you even talked about an idea, let alone seriously tried to do an experiment about it. And your career gets trashed because of the *politics* of science funding. Science is a human enterprise after all, and humans being humans...
Kudos to the kid saving his mom, but it is also kind of sad about how isolated and dependent on institutions and technology so many of us have become... So much so, we just take it for granted a four year old would have no neighbor or relative nearby to turn to.
Perhaps I was just lucky to grow up (lower-ish) middle class in a suburb in the 1960s with siblings, many stay-at-home moms as friendly neighbors all around, as well as lots of kids playing in the street. That seems to be a world that perhaps hardly exists anymore in the USA for any child... Other countries may be more likely to still have that kind of circumstance perhaps...
And more wealth seems to only make it worse -- see for example:
"The Problem With Rich Kids"
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
"In a surprising switch, the offspring of the affluent today are more distressed than other youth. They show disturbingly high rates of substance use, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, cheating, and stealing. It gives a whole new meaning to having it all."
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" ...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
"Evolutionary psychologists have suggested, furthermore, that wealthy communities can, paradoxically, be among those most likely to engender feelings of friendlessness and isolation in their inhabitants. As Tooby and Cosmides (1996) argued, the most reliable evidence of genuine friendship is that of help offered during times of dire need: People tend never to forget the sacrifices of those who provide help during their darkest hours. Modern living conditions, however, present relatively few threats to physical well-being. Medical science has reduced several sources of disease, many hostile forces of nature have been controlled, and laws and police forces deter assault and murder. Ironically, therefore, the greater the availability of amenities of modern living in a community, the fewer are the occurrences of critical events that indicate to people which of their friends are truly engaged in their welfare and which are only fair-weather companions. This lack of critical assessment events, in turn, engenders lingering mistrustfulness despite the presence of apparently warm interactions (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).
Physical characteristics of wealthy suburban communities may also contribute to feelings of isolation. Houses in these communities are often set far apart with privacy of all ensured by long driveways, high hedges, and sprawling lawns (Weitzman, 2000; Wilson-Doenges, 2000). Neighbors are unlikely to casually bump into each other as they come and go in their communities, and children are unlikely to play on street corners. Paradoxically, once again, it is possible that the wealthiest neighborhoods are among the most vulnerable to low levels of cohesiveness and efficacy (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). When encountering an errant, disruptive child of the millionaire acquaintance next door, neighbors tend to be reluctant to intervene not only because of respect for others' privacy but also, more pragmatically, because of fears of litigation (e.g., Warner, 1991)."
It used to be we lived in tribes and then still close-knit communities...
Daniel Quinn proposes we try to go back to that way of life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"New tribalists believe that the tribal model, though not absolutely "perfect," has obviously stood the test of time as the most successful social organization for humans, in alignment with natural selection (just as well as the hive model for bees, the pod model for whales, and the pack model for wolves). According to new tribalists, the tribe fulfills both an emotionally and organizationally stabilizing role in human li
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
The most important for a company to re-invent itself is the first item and it relates to "shoplifting all of the spare hours":
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency (by Tom DeMarco)"
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G...
He says there is a tradeoff between efficiency meeting old needs quickly) versus effectiveness (meeting new needs with flexibility & responsiveness).
DeMarco points out that it is precisely the middle management layer that needs some slack time the most to be able to innovate in ways that lead to organizational learning. But everyone needs slack time to take part in that too. IBM is likely going in the completely wrong direction if it is reeling people in to presumably over-schedule them even more.
I last worked for IBM in Research about sixteen years ago myself... The project I worked the most on was the IBM Personal Speech Assistant (a forerunner to Siri and such). The team was very proud that Lou asked for one for his office:
http://liamcomerford.com/alpha...
But -- I had enough "slack" then (after a year of hard work) that when my then supervisor (his site above) went on a two week vacation, I build a speech activated display wall out of used ThinkPads which looked a lot like a Jeopardy board. (A coworker said it was a a good thing I was not in the lab when my supervisor first walked in after his vacation. :-) I always wonder though if years later that spark led to the idea of Watson being on Jeopardy?
Still think a conversational display wall is a good idea to pursue further. And I still want to make a programming language tailored to being edited easily via voice recognition. Of course IBM has long since sold off ViaVoice... And while there was some slack in Research then around 2000, I was told it was nothing like what was there in the 1970s and 1980s where a lot more creativity was possible. So, even then, these ideas were unlikely to be pursue-able.
And also around 2000, on teamwork at Research, one thing I heard at lunch was someone saying something like "We hire the top people from the most competitive schools and then wonder why they have trouble getting along.." There is a certain lack of diversity as well from such hiring practices.
I'm all for distributed systems, but for many big companies, mainframes still make a lot of economic sense:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/...
"While some believe that smaller distributed servers provide the agility needed in today's fast-moving cognitive era, the IBM mainframe is the preferred solution for many of the world's most competitive businesses, including:
92 of the top 100 banks worldwide
70%+ of the world's largest retailers
23 of the world's 25 largest airlines"
And see also, on a smaller scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"IBM designed IBM i as a "turnkey" operating system, requiring little or no on-site attention from IT staff during normal operation. For example, IBM i has a built-in DB2 database which does not require separate installation. Disks are multiply redundant, and can be replaced on line without interrupting work. Hardware and software maintenance tasks are integrated. System administration has been wizard-driven for years, even before that term was defined. This automatic self-care policy goes so far as to automatically schedule all common system maintenance, detect many failures and even order spare parts and service automatically. Organizations using i sometimes have sticker shock when confronting the cost of system maintenance on other systems.[1]"
In general:
"Why on Earth Is IBM Still Making Mainframes?"
https://www.wired.com/2015/01/...
"Business is more mobile than ever. Yet however lightweight those mobile devices feel in your pocket, they can still make good use of a big, powerful machine chugging away in a back room, not going anywhere."
Mainframes are also more than just hardware. Mainframes are in a sense a culture of 100% uptime and reliability.
That said, distributed computing continues to improve... And distributed computing culture continues to improve...
As to the original article, IBM is still shooting itself in the foot with this move away from supporting remote work... What IBM needs to be creative is not colocation but "slack" in the Tom DeMarco sense:
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G...
"Why is it that today's superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth."
That was the great thing about IBM Research when I worked there around 2000 -- a bit of slack to be creative and good work/life balance. But, IBMers even then said the rest of IBM was not like Research...
See also a comment by "Rene" here: http://www.e-catworld.com/2017...
Perhaps the opposite of: http://brilliantlightpower.com...
"The SunCell was invented and engineered to harness the clean energy source from the reaction of the hydrogen atoms of water molecules to form a non-polluting product, lower-energy state hydrogen called "Hydrino" that is the dark matter of the universe wherein the energy release of H2O to Hydrino and oxygen is 100 times that of an equivalent amount of high-octane gasoline at an unprecedented high power density. The compact power is manifest as thousands of Sun equivalents that can be directly converted to electrical output using commercial concentrator photovoltaic cells."
Assuming hydrinos really exist...
But probably it is plain old chemistry...
AC, I like your idea of measuring the weight distribution in the battery in any case.