I consider pinging my system to be the electronic equivalent of jiggling my front doorknob to see if the door will open: Is it "fair use" of my front door?
Are they jiggling your doorknob, or your gate ? These analogies are not always good.
ICMP is a network service: it could be argued that as a network service, it is a common across the board infrastructure and its like the road that comes up to your front gate. Anything above the network (transport layer, session layer, application layer, etc) is the analogy to your doorknob. TCP and UDP ports are private property to your system, but IP is your contract with the rest of the network. No one else on the network needs to run TCP or UDP, but everyone must run IP or you can't communicate. Therefore, IP is on the boundary of public/private property and is a gray area.
If they started scanning your TCP or UDP ports, then it's time to get annoyed. I still see a valid concern about touching your IP, but I think that is a similar concern to the problem we have with direct junk mail. Perhaps the solution is to eventually have any of these IP scanners abide by some kind of fair use agreement (like web spiders), so that you can deny them access.
the advertisers aren't helping WAP
on
WAP Under Fire
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· Score: 1
The advertisers are not helping the situation by suggesting that phones are 'internet' or 'wap' "capable". It may be a good marketing ploy to sell phones, and to see high end models, but in my experience, people feel a bit cheesed off with the results are disappointing - that's not doing much to inspire confidence in the industry and the technology.
This number can be reduced somewhat because there is knowledge of subnetting and so on. What is interesting is that Quova could take a lead position, because it will build maps, data and correlations which are largely stationary over time. For instance, a large domain will remain 'relatively' static and does not need to be revisited with a high frequency.
Kind of like someone trying to get into the search engine business: they need to allow for the bootstrapping period to scan the net before the large databases are built, and once the databases are built, they can exploit caching, compression and other information optimisation techniques to maintain leadership over peers.
Mapping the net is probably only second to their main business goal. I would speculate that they may be doing what Amazon is doing with Purchase Circles - building demographic information about originators of ecommerce transactions. There'd be a lot of value in information of this type, even if they only make 'fuzzy' correlations.
Maybe there needs to be an 'internet metric protocol' that is a more refined version of traceroute: even if just a designated name, such as 'XYZ.metric.WHATEVER.NAME.DOMAIN'; where XYZ could be any sort of subqualifier. Just an off the wall thought.
From that article as well as others such as this one it looks like the U.S. is lagging behind in technology that is commonplace in almost every other industrialized nation.
The U.S. has partially lost out with mobile technology: europe and a large proportion of the rest of the world have adopted GSM, and have also succesfully developed global roaming. The U.S. is happy to have regionally disparate and different networks. If I remember correctly, the same occurred with ISDN: the first east to west coast ISDN call was only carried out circa. 1996.
This seems typical of the U.S. to some extent: so competitive that it sometimes self-defeating, and everyone loses out in the end.
I can roam across Europe seamlessly, and to Australia as well, all with the one handset: that's pretty good I think.
Text messaging (GSM Short Message Service) has taken off significantly in Europe, with reports suggesting that carriers have been surprised at the volume. They cite various reasons for people using SMS : short messages are cheaper than calls, short messages mean that people avoid having to have a 'gossipy' type conversation, short messages allow other people to think about the response, etc.
I think a killer-app would be to have a community based (i.e. IRC channels, etc) chat system accessible by phones - it could work as a good semi-realtime way of keeping in touch with your community of friends.
If you make a mint out of the above idea - send me a postcard.
If you examine the development of GUI's so far, they've increasingly moved towards multi-dimensionality - i.e. many windows, many tasks operating at once, personal adaptability, etc.
Perhaps the next user interfaces are really 3d and immersive; i.e. you sit within a spatial field and around you in 360degrees is your operating environment. It's gibsonesque, and requires another round of technological advances.
I should add: in the old media, there was little way to know if information was complete, or assess the reputation of those providing the information and so on. In the new media, there's a greater ability to do that - in real time, and with real time feedback.
Trust and reputation are what real old school journalism is about.
Trust and reputation are are in new and old media, however new media allows a greater interactivity and feedback from readers and the audience.
The fact that you've just commented on the differences between various Boston newspapers is already a piece of information I didn't know. I don't know whether I should trust what you say, but if many other people agree with you, and then agree with other things you say, you'll build up a reputation as a trust worthy commentator : I might then have an increased confidence in what you say.
New media allows what you also suggest: ability to delve deeper into issues, no doubt about that. The issues that I mention are orthogonal to completeness, and in fact assist completeness -- for instance, if 200 people comment on an article, and one high reputable and trustworthy person says that it is 'complete', then I may not need to look at further detail. If those people are mistaken, then they'll lose their reputation.
You could possibly suggest that Slashdot has some similarities to chat systems : a community of real time dialogue and feedback. However Slashdot goes a bit further, as its content is of a better tone.
Consider that specialised communities could develop, and they could become open media places for continuous dialogue: for instance, one site could specialise in information about 'microprocessors' and have continual stream of links posted to it about new press releases, new product announcements, new white papers, new research, possible questions and other sorts of things. The community that revolves around this site reads and responds to the information: reputations develop and the communal dialogue helps all participants form better understands 'two minds are better than one'. What you then have is a very competent specialised node in a larger matrix of information.
This is because Open Media requires more democratic reputation systems - exactly what Amazon is developing. You trust information that comes from people and organisations that have built up trust over time, and could just as easily lose trust very quickly.
Expect to see reputation and identity systems become a major issues in the coming years.
It is an undisputed fact that society is now is rapidly developing the global collective consciousness as a repository of human knowledge and experience - as described by Manuel Castells in his portrait of 'the informational age', and the tensions between 'the net and the self'.
This development has been coming for centuries, but the internet has become a significant catalyst that in retrospect was inevitable, but only when it occurred did it make the bigger picture clearer to society.
As part of this development, information has become the primary resource of the age, and will continue to do so in the coming years. As with any resource, it becomes refined through specialisation, differentiation and other means.
I think Open Media is a less precise or less well targetted description for a broader trend across all aspects of information in society. Your analysis could have included a broader context in a more succinct and precise manner.
Relevant literature: Manuel Castells 'The Information Age' for a scholastic analysis of society; and Ray Kurzweills 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' for an elaboration on the potential future.
HAM radio is far from dead, it's still active - but it is an archaic practice. There was a time when a lot of young children fascinated with electronics built ham radio kits, chatted over the air, dreamed of far away places and so on. HAM radio was a culture of home brew, electronics, comradeship and many other things.
I would suggest that a lot that momementum has gone elsewhere, and while there are many people still practicing ham radio, not nearly enough younger people are interested any more: they're far more interested in new age computer technologies, perhaps even the likes of/.
I would be interested to hear a comment from a someone much more in tune with the culture who can substantiate or repudiate the above.
I don't care whether food production is a craft or not - I only care about quality, availability and other issues. This is not always something that multi-nationals care about, but that's because the customers don't stop buying! Medieval crafts still do exist, and will always exist - but they are costly, perhaps the same will occur with food ? I mean, I love good resturants and great food, but of course, it costs! Just as much as a I love fine swiss watches, but they cost as well! Farms and farmers may survive, but not in competition with the 'mass market' - in the same way that custom jewellery cannot compete with the 'mass market'.
With regard to the issue about small farmers and other people being squeezed out of their 'way of life' - perhaps it is important to take a broad look at the way society is changing across the board. Are the children of these people taking on new-age roles and jobs, and living in the future ? If so, then it is inevitable that life in the new world will not include 'small farmers' as anything other than a lifestyle choice, rather than an economically sustainable way to live. The same thing happened to 'blacksmiths' and 'wood turners' as the world ebbed into industrialisation -- such is life, and such is progress!
If everyone involved acted based upon these tenets, I don't think anyone in their right mind could argue. Sadly, I don't believe that this is the case. There are just too many radicals who would rather beat down one group to advance their own.
Thank you for your comments: I agree that I am being somewhat idealistic, but ideals are what we try to aim for. My general belief is that people of all different persuasions, beliefs and ideals should be free to live with each other, and free to advance their own agenda and their own way of life, but not to the detriment of other people. Sometimes radical action is necessary, because other means fail - and that does include allowing radical actions that are eventually proven 'wrong' - such is freedom - but radical action does not need to harm or denigrate others if society is consensus oriented. Irrespective of any of that, what is undisputedly wrong are ill conceived stereotypes and judgemental behaviour that denegrates and demolishes the individual spirit. Society should be predicated on a base line respect and tolerance and set of civil codes that all agree to and buy in to, upon which the individual and the group can do and live as they please. It's a complex topic, and I'm no way near to being able to do justice to it.
I'll try to provide some information to help you think about this. This is not a well considered response, because only a several pages could do justice to the complexity of the topic.
Society does not need be engineered to be perfectly symmetrical, but it does need to be engineered to ensure that pathways are open to qualified people based upon performance and ability, and not based upon archaic notions of 'tradition', 'roles' and ill-conceived 'stereo-types' that are held by less enlightened people. Even otherwise 'good' people can be unenlightened.
A short term solution is to ensure that women (or, in general, any disadvantaged group) can pursue these pathways, and then they can become role models and examples for others to follow: they've taken the lead and made headway into new territory - they provide inspiration for others. In the long term, hopefully this means that a lot of barriers are broken down as others realise 'yes, that is possible, people can do that'.
Women and men may be interested in different things - I can't comment on the basis of that and whether it is founded in genetics or development. Actually, who cares what they are or aren't interested in - so long as they are informed about the wide ranges of opportunities available, and they can pursue those opportunities without prejudices and with the acceptance of people around them. The same applies to men pursuing areas that are considered 'women only'.
One of the best ways to solve the problem is to ensure that children are educated so that they are less assuming and more accepting, and so that they have enough self-esteem to pursue their goals in the face of opposition - perhaps these things will help build a tolerant society.
There are many other issues as well (for instance, is part of the goal to ensure that if the male population declines or moves its interest elsewhere, then there are enough women to continue the EE profession...).
That said, sure, there might be a place for them; as another poster said, it might be nice to be able to rent a package just for an afternoon or a week. OTOH, I would be very unhappy to have my entire system be composed of rented applications. I believe that we'll see the same phenomenon as with housing: the renters will be the ones who only need a short-term resource or can't afford to actually buy.
Agreed. It's all about economics: cost, risk and various tradeoffs. As with transport: you have tradeoffs between bicycles, cars, busses, trains, planes, lear-jets and so on -- according to cost, time, risk and other factors. Intelligent people make appropriate tradeoffs, but there may end up being a disadvantaged class - technology is not neutral.
Exactly your concerns about renting all of your applications is what will prevent an absolute version of ASP occurring - your concern may come down to risk and privacy. Some people don't want to own their car, so they lease. Other people are happy to own their car, and outsource maintenance. Others do their own maintenance. I could make endless analogies, according to all manner of diversity.
The point is that computing/communications technology is evolving to become a broader and deeper part of society, and respond to the complexity and variety of diverse niches and needs. C'est la vie!
I see Application Service Providers as a step in the right direction, but it is going to be hype driven. They are a tactical part of a larger strategic evolution towards distributed computing.
Future software is destined to be distributed and collaborative. It is likely that the software will exist splattered across local and remote devices. For instance, the core of my hypermedia editing package may be installed on my pc, but I may buy or rent advanced features across the net. As another example: I may take multiple angle pictures of my car, and want to turn it into a 3d representation, so I load the pictures into Photoshop, then browse an ASP that offers a '2d->3d' service, and after browsing a reduced sample of the output, decide to purchase the result. It takes only 10 seconds for the ASP to do the rendering, and I pay them a few dollars - I could never do the rendering on my local PC, because I just don't have the memory or computing power. My use of the ASP is virtually seamless, it doesn't even seem as though I'm running my task on a remote system.
The problem as I see it - common across all of technology - is that ASP has been jumped up as a 'buzzword' and a hype. Suddenly vendors must be on the boat, and will implement ASP solutions - sometimes oblivious to the long term trend. At the same time, users may buy into the hype as well, going for ASP when it may not be the best option. A judicious analysis of cost/benefits is the right way to determine whether ASP is useful.
If I can suggest an analogy: B2B market places have been around for years, and can be seen as an eventual element in the roadmap towards post industrial society. It just so happens that enabling factors come to play at the right time, and the technology grows to maturity. Unfortunately, the ideal B2B framework may not be used, so some form of shakeout and correction will occur. You could say that this has already ocurred: those bungled overloaded X.400 EDI systems are giving way to new XML type framework. It's almost analogous to the way that a ubiquitous communications protocol framework was eventually on the roadmap, it just happened to end up being TCP/IP rather than anything else (the nearest is maybe GOSIP).
In any case: the enabling factors are in place for computing to make the next step, towards becoming further distributed and collaborative at an acceptable economic cost. So ASP's will start to take off, and then then the computing blur will continue to set in. There are other elements of the computing blur starting to happen across the landscape.
Cambridge UK is the central point for high tech R&D in England (Reading is more of an commercial IT type area, and LondonCity is more financial) - with a lot of biotech and software firms, including a number of web based start ups. AT&T and Microsoft have R&D centres here.
Good points: - it's a student town, so there are lots of pubs, and lots of people from different places, so a sort of international melting pot community. - in the university environment, there are a lots of lectures, classes and interesting things to do if you are in the student/graduate social scene. - job wise, there's a shortage of engineering supply, and lots of software work, you can walk out of a job one day and pick up another one the next day. - close to the excitement of London, only 50mins by train into central London for museums, nightlife and everything else, London is one of the great cities you need to experience. - close to major airports such as Stansted, and Heathrow/London, making it cheap and easy to take off on holidays around Europe, including discount operators such as Go, Easyjet and Ryanair. - Cambridge university is on the academic tour circuit, so there are lectures by and visits by well known 'stars'. - the pound is strong, so being paid in pounds sterling is good. - its a cycle town, so you can get around by bicycle easily and cheaply, plus it's also semi-rural, so you can escape into the surrounding countryside in several minutes. - a reasonably civil and cultured community: arts theatres, arts cinemas, reasonably good restaurants, museums, sports activities, etc. - more of a community and friendly rural town feel than of a busy carbon-monoxide drenched city (i.e. the feeling of London or Oxford).
Bad points: - traffic is bad, trying to drive around in during peak hour, or finding parking spots at any time, can be problematic. - english weather is often dreary and bland. - the cost of living is relatively high compared to the average salary that people earn. - british reservedness and class attitudes, which are still somewhat prevalent. - in technology/engineering/commercial terms, the practices are behind the united states and australia (in my experiences so far) - it is no match for silicon valley. - high rents and living costs, and housing shortage in general - accomodation is impossible to find at times.
I've been here for 2.5 years now - I have worked, travelled, studied, attended university formal functions, made friends in the university, spent time in London, hung around coffee houses, devoured books in the many book stores, entertained friends as visitors and a lot more. I only wish that the weather was better.
If your career/job skills match the speciality of the area (high tech R&D), then Cambridge can be a good base for several years of work, travel and life.
What is 'art' is one of the great debates of the ages, and to try and simplify it can't give justice to the complexities and nuances. Suffice to say that computer achitecture and software architecture can be just as 'art'ful, as a visual work of art. One of the things art does is reveal new realities, display aesthetic beauty, and make creative connections beyond what craftsman do. You could say that artists create the rules, find the new rules, and experiment with the rules - whereas the craftsman usually just 'apply' - hence the age old distinction of 'applied arts'.
When an existing algorithm is 10 pages long, unweidly and unoptimal with numerous mathematical operations and constructs - and then a master mathematican comes along and creates a new algorithm of beauty and simplicity to perform an otherwise 'boring' goal - I call that art just as much as monet dabbling in the nuances of light and colour on a painted canvas.
One of the overall philosophical themes of the current age is the increasing ability for humans to master reality in all shapes and forms.
In the case of materials science, one of the initial phases is the ability to graft together and create constructions of different types of materials available to us : i.e. hybrid materials. In the long term, our mastery of reality will result in nano-technology, where just about any material can be constructed, and new strange types of materials as well.
A sword like this could be an important milestone in the history of materials technology.
Games, virtual reality and fantasy worlds are the new literature in many ways.
They should be both software and art in the same way that a book is composed of writing and art. Books are constructed with textual grammatical substrate that is open source to everyone - the art is in using this to construct an experience. The virtual reality game experience is little different, now the substrate is software -- more dynamic than text. Another analogy can be drawn from board games, role playing games, virtual environments, MUDs and all manner of immersive environments.
Robert Wilson -- a wealthy and respected professor at MIT -- was recently sued for damages after theives stole his BMW and killed a girl on their joyride. The theives broke through a sophisticated alarm system and took the BMW for a joyride through outer neighbourhoods of Boston while under the influence of alchohol. During the joyride, Samantha Caily was knocked over and killed - a tragic death for a young girl barely 15. Samantha's parents sued Robert Wilson for damages, claiming that he was responsible for their childs death. "If he'd employed a better alarm system, Samantha would be with us today. It's clearly his fault. Those boys are known theives, and they can't help themselves, but Robert should know better", said Martha Caily. The theives, who were later caught, have a history of car theft, they were released with a traffic infringement: they're poor and of no fixed abode - barely able to afford the bus ticket home.
This seems more useful as a high end device for hired or chauffered cars, for busy people.
Consider a) arriving off the plane in a foreign country, and catching up with news and execs back home via. videoconferencing/etc in the car. b) being entertained with with it on medium distance business trips (
Slashdot Mirror
I consider pinging my system to be the electronic equivalent of jiggling my front doorknob to see if the door will open: Is it "fair use" of my front door?
Are they jiggling your doorknob, or your gate ? These analogies are not always good.
ICMP is a network service: it could be argued that as a network service, it is a common across the board infrastructure and its like the road that comes up to your front gate. Anything above the network (transport layer, session layer, application layer, etc) is the analogy to your doorknob. TCP and UDP ports are private property to your system, but IP is your contract with the rest of the network. No one else on the network needs to run TCP or UDP, but everyone must run IP or you can't communicate. Therefore, IP is on the boundary of public/private property and is a gray area.
If they started scanning your TCP or UDP ports, then it's time to get annoyed. I still see a valid concern about touching your IP, but I think that is a similar concern to the problem we have with direct junk mail. Perhaps the solution is to eventually have any of these IP scanners abide by some kind of fair use agreement (like web spiders), so that you can deny them access.
The advertisers are not helping the situation by suggesting that phones are 'internet' or 'wap' "capable". It may be a good marketing ploy to sell phones, and to see high end models, but in my experience, people feel a bit cheesed off with the results are disappointing - that's not doing much to inspire confidence in the industry and the technology.
This number can be reduced somewhat because there is knowledge of subnetting and so on. What is interesting is that Quova could take a lead position, because it will build maps, data and correlations which are largely stationary over time. For instance, a large domain will remain 'relatively' static and does not need to be revisited with a high frequency.
Kind of like someone trying to get into the search engine business: they need to allow for the bootstrapping period to scan the net before the large databases are built, and once the databases are built, they can exploit caching, compression and other information optimisation techniques to maintain leadership over peers.
Mapping the net is probably only second to their main business goal. I would speculate that they may be doing what Amazon is doing with Purchase Circles - building demographic information about originators of ecommerce transactions. There'd be a lot of value in information of this type, even if they only make 'fuzzy' correlations.
Maybe there needs to be an 'internet metric protocol' that is a more refined version of traceroute: even if just a designated name, such as 'XYZ.metric.WHATEVER.NAME.DOMAIN'; where XYZ could be any sort of subqualifier. Just an off the wall thought.
From that article as well as others such as this one it looks like the U.S. is lagging behind in technology that is commonplace in almost every other industrialized nation.
The U.S. has partially lost out with mobile technology: europe and a large proportion of the rest of the world have adopted GSM, and have also succesfully developed global roaming. The U.S. is happy to have regionally disparate and different networks. If I remember correctly, the same occurred with ISDN: the first east to west coast ISDN call was only carried out circa. 1996.
This seems typical of the U.S. to some extent: so competitive that it sometimes self-defeating, and everyone loses out in the end.
I can roam across Europe seamlessly, and to Australia as well, all with the one handset: that's pretty good I think.
Text messaging (GSM Short Message Service) has taken off significantly in Europe, with reports suggesting that carriers have been surprised at the volume. They cite various reasons for people using SMS : short messages are cheaper than calls, short messages mean that people avoid having to have a 'gossipy' type conversation, short messages allow other people to think about the response, etc.
I think a killer-app would be to have a community based (i.e. IRC channels, etc) chat system accessible by phones - it could work as a good semi-realtime way of keeping in touch with your community of friends.
If you make a mint out of the above idea - send me a postcard.
If you examine the development of GUI's so far, they've increasingly moved towards multi-dimensionality - i.e. many windows, many tasks operating at once, personal adaptability, etc.
Perhaps the next user interfaces are really 3d and immersive; i.e. you sit within a spatial field and around you in 360degrees is your operating environment. It's gibsonesque, and requires another round of technological advances.
I should add: in the old media, there was little way to know if information was complete, or assess the reputation of those providing the information and so on. In the new media, there's a greater ability to do that - in real time, and with real time feedback.
Trust and reputation are what real old school journalism is about.
Trust and reputation are are in new and old media, however new media allows a greater interactivity and feedback from readers and the audience.
The fact that you've just commented on the differences between various Boston newspapers is already a piece of information I didn't know. I don't know whether I should trust what you say, but if many other people agree with you, and then agree with other things you say, you'll build up a reputation as a trust worthy commentator : I might then have an increased confidence in what you say.
New media allows what you also suggest: ability to delve deeper into issues, no doubt about that. The issues that I mention are orthogonal to completeness, and in fact assist completeness -- for instance, if 200 people comment on an article, and one high reputable and trustworthy person says that it is 'complete', then I may not need to look at further detail. If those people are mistaken, then they'll lose their reputation.
You could possibly suggest that Slashdot has some similarities to chat systems : a community of real time dialogue and feedback. However Slashdot goes a bit further, as its content is of a better tone.
Consider that specialised communities could develop, and they could become open media places for continuous dialogue: for instance, one site could specialise in information about 'microprocessors' and have continual stream of links posted to it about new press releases, new product announcements, new white papers, new research, possible questions and other sorts of things. The community that revolves around this site reads and responds to the information: reputations develop and the communal dialogue helps all participants form better understands 'two minds are better than one'. What you then have is a very competent specialised node in a larger matrix of information.
This is because Open Media requires more democratic reputation systems - exactly what Amazon is developing. You trust information that comes from people and organisations that have built up trust over time, and could just as easily lose trust very quickly.
Expect to see reputation and identity systems become a major issues in the coming years.
It is an undisputed fact that society is now is rapidly developing the global collective consciousness as a repository of human knowledge and experience - as described by Manuel Castells in his portrait of 'the informational age', and the tensions between 'the net and the self'.
This development has been coming for centuries, but the internet has become a significant catalyst that in retrospect was inevitable, but only when it occurred did it make the bigger picture clearer to society.
As part of this development, information has become the primary resource of the age, and will continue to do so in the coming years. As with any resource, it becomes refined through specialisation, differentiation and other means.
I think Open Media is a less precise or less well targetted description for a broader trend across all aspects of information in society. Your analysis could have included a broader context in a more succinct and precise manner.
Relevant literature: Manuel Castells 'The Information Age' for a scholastic analysis of society; and Ray Kurzweills 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' for an elaboration on the potential future.
HAM radio is far from dead, it's still active - but it is an archaic practice. There was a time when a lot of young children fascinated with electronics built ham radio kits, chatted over the air, dreamed of far away places and so on. HAM radio was a culture of home brew, electronics, comradeship and many other things.
I would suggest that a lot that momementum has gone elsewhere, and while there are many people still practicing ham radio, not nearly enough younger people are interested any more: they're far more interested in new age computer technologies, perhaps even the likes of /.
I would be interested to hear a comment from a someone much more in tune with the culture who can substantiate or repudiate the above.
I don't care whether food production is a craft or not - I only care about quality, availability and other issues. This is not always something that multi-nationals care about, but that's because the customers don't stop buying! Medieval crafts still do exist, and will always exist - but they are costly, perhaps the same will occur with food ? I mean, I love good resturants and great food, but of course, it costs! Just as much as a I love fine swiss watches, but they cost as well! Farms and farmers may survive, but not in competition with the 'mass market' - in the same way that custom jewellery cannot compete with the 'mass market'.
With regard to the issue about small farmers and other people being squeezed out of their 'way of life' - perhaps it is important to take a broad look at the way society is changing across the board. Are the children of these people taking on new-age roles and jobs, and living in the future ? If so, then it is inevitable that life in the new world will not include 'small farmers' as anything other than a lifestyle choice, rather than an economically sustainable way to live. The same thing happened to 'blacksmiths' and 'wood turners' as the world ebbed into industrialisation -- such is life, and such is progress!
If everyone involved acted based upon these tenets, I don't think anyone in their right mind could argue. Sadly, I don't believe that this is the case. There are just too many radicals who would rather beat down one group to advance their own.
Thank you for your comments: I agree that I am being somewhat idealistic, but ideals are what we try to aim for. My general belief is that people of all different persuasions, beliefs and ideals should be free to live with each other, and free to advance their own agenda and their own way of life, but not to the detriment of other people. Sometimes radical action is necessary, because other means fail - and that does include allowing radical actions that are eventually proven 'wrong' - such is freedom - but radical action does not need to harm or denigrate others if society is consensus oriented. Irrespective of any of that, what is undisputedly wrong are ill conceived stereotypes and judgemental behaviour that denegrates and demolishes the individual spirit. Society should be predicated on a base line respect and tolerance and set of civil codes that all agree to and buy in to, upon which the individual and the group can do and live as they please. It's a complex topic, and I'm no way near to being able to do justice to it.
I'll try to provide some information to help you think about this. This is not a well considered response, because only a several pages could do justice to the complexity of the topic.
Society does not need be engineered to be perfectly symmetrical, but it does need to be engineered to ensure that pathways are open to qualified people based upon performance and ability, and not based upon archaic notions of 'tradition', 'roles' and ill-conceived 'stereo-types' that are held by less enlightened people. Even otherwise 'good' people can be unenlightened.
A short term solution is to ensure that women (or, in general, any disadvantaged group) can pursue these pathways, and then they can become role models and examples for others to follow: they've taken the lead and made headway into new territory - they provide inspiration for others. In the long term, hopefully this means that a lot of barriers are broken down as others realise 'yes, that is possible, people can do that'.
Women and men may be interested in different things - I can't comment on the basis of that and whether it is founded in genetics or development. Actually, who cares what they are or aren't interested in - so long as they are informed about the wide ranges of opportunities available, and they can pursue those opportunities without prejudices and with the acceptance of people around them. The same applies to men pursuing areas that are considered 'women only'.
One of the best ways to solve the problem is to ensure that children are educated so that they are less assuming and more accepting, and so that they have enough self-esteem to pursue their goals in the face of opposition - perhaps these things will help build a tolerant society.
There are many other issues as well (for instance, is part of the goal to ensure that if the male population declines or moves its interest elsewhere, then there are enough women to continue the EE profession ...).
That said, sure, there might be a place for them; as another poster said, it might be nice to be able to rent a package just for an afternoon or a week. OTOH, I would be very unhappy to have my entire system be composed of rented applications. I believe that we'll see the same phenomenon as with housing: the renters will be the ones who only need a short-term resource or can't afford to actually buy.
Agreed. It's all about economics: cost, risk and various tradeoffs. As with transport: you have tradeoffs between bicycles, cars, busses, trains, planes, lear-jets and so on -- according to cost, time, risk and other factors. Intelligent people make appropriate tradeoffs, but there may end up being a disadvantaged class - technology is not neutral.
Exactly your concerns about renting all of your applications is what will prevent an absolute version of ASP occurring - your concern may come down to risk and privacy. Some people don't want to own their car, so they lease. Other people are happy to own their car, and outsource maintenance. Others do their own maintenance. I could make endless analogies, according to all manner of diversity.
The point is that computing/communications technology is evolving to become a broader and deeper part of society, and respond to the complexity and variety of diverse niches and needs. C'est la vie!
I see Application Service Providers as a step in the right direction, but it is going to be hype driven. They are a tactical part of a larger strategic evolution towards distributed computing.
Future software is destined to be distributed and collaborative. It is likely that the software will exist splattered across local and remote devices. For instance, the core of my hypermedia editing package may be installed on my pc, but I may buy or rent advanced features across the net. As another example: I may take multiple angle pictures of my car, and want to turn it into a 3d representation, so I load the pictures into Photoshop, then browse an ASP that offers a '2d->3d' service, and after browsing a reduced sample of the output, decide to purchase the result. It takes only 10 seconds for the ASP to do the rendering, and I pay them a few dollars - I could never do the rendering on my local PC, because I just don't have the memory or computing power. My use of the ASP is virtually seamless, it doesn't even seem as though I'm running my task on a remote system.
The problem as I see it - common across all of technology - is that ASP has been jumped up as a 'buzzword' and a hype. Suddenly vendors must be on the boat, and will implement ASP solutions - sometimes oblivious to the long term trend. At the same time, users may buy into the hype as well, going for ASP when it may not be the best option. A judicious analysis of cost/benefits is the right way to determine whether ASP is useful.
If I can suggest an analogy: B2B market places have been around for years, and can be seen as an eventual element in the roadmap towards post industrial society. It just so happens that enabling factors come to play at the right time, and the technology grows to maturity. Unfortunately, the ideal B2B framework may not be used, so some form of shakeout and correction will occur. You could say that this has already ocurred: those bungled overloaded X.400 EDI systems are giving way to new XML type framework. It's almost analogous to the way that a ubiquitous communications protocol framework was eventually on the roadmap, it just happened to end up being TCP/IP rather than anything else (the nearest is maybe GOSIP).
In any case: the enabling factors are in place for computing to make the next step, towards becoming further distributed and collaborative at an acceptable economic cost. So ASP's will start to take off, and then then the computing blur will continue to set in. There are other elements of the computing blur starting to happen across the landscape.
Cambridge UK is the central point for high tech R&D in England (Reading is more of an commercial IT type area, and LondonCity is more financial) - with a lot of biotech and software firms, including a number of web based start ups. AT&T and Microsoft have R&D centres here.
Good points:
- it's a student town, so there are lots of pubs, and lots of people from different places, so a sort of international melting pot community.
- in the university environment, there are a lots of lectures, classes and interesting things to do if you are in the student/graduate social scene.
- job wise, there's a shortage of engineering supply, and lots of software work, you can walk out of a job one day and pick up another one the next day.
- close to the excitement of London, only 50mins by train into central London for museums, nightlife and everything else, London is one of the great cities you need to experience.
- close to major airports such as Stansted, and Heathrow/London, making it cheap and easy to take off on holidays around Europe, including discount operators such as Go, Easyjet and Ryanair.
- Cambridge university is on the academic tour circuit, so there are lectures by and visits by well known 'stars'.
- the pound is strong, so being paid in pounds sterling is good.
- its a cycle town, so you can get around by bicycle easily and cheaply, plus it's also semi-rural, so you can escape into the surrounding countryside in several minutes.
- a reasonably civil and cultured community: arts theatres, arts cinemas, reasonably good restaurants, museums, sports activities, etc.
- more of a community and friendly rural town feel than of a busy carbon-monoxide drenched city (i.e. the feeling of London or Oxford).
Bad points:
- traffic is bad, trying to drive around in during peak hour, or finding parking spots at any time, can be problematic.
- english weather is often dreary and bland.
- the cost of living is relatively high compared to the average salary that people earn.
- british reservedness and class attitudes, which are still somewhat prevalent.
- in technology/engineering/commercial terms, the practices are behind the united states and australia (in my experiences so far) - it is no match for silicon valley.
- high rents and living costs, and housing shortage in general - accomodation is impossible to find at times.
I've been here for 2.5 years now - I have worked, travelled, studied, attended university formal functions, made friends in the university, spent time in London, hung around coffee houses, devoured books in the many book stores, entertained friends as visitors and a lot more. I only wish that the weather was better.
If your career/job skills match the speciality of the area (high tech R&D), then Cambridge can be a good base for several years of work, travel and life.
What is 'art' is one of the great debates of the ages, and to try and simplify it can't give justice to the complexities and nuances. Suffice to say that computer achitecture and software architecture can be just as 'art'ful, as a visual work of art. One of the things art does is reveal new realities, display aesthetic beauty, and make creative connections beyond what craftsman do. You could say that artists create the rules, find the new rules, and experiment with the rules - whereas the craftsman usually just 'apply' - hence the age old distinction of 'applied arts'.
When an existing algorithm is 10 pages long, unweidly and unoptimal with numerous mathematical operations and constructs - and then a master mathematican comes along and creates a new algorithm of beauty and simplicity to perform an otherwise 'boring' goal - I call that art just as much as monet dabbling in the nuances of light and colour on a painted canvas.
One of the overall philosophical themes of the current age is the increasing ability for humans to master reality in all shapes and forms.
In the case of materials science, one of the initial phases is the ability to graft together and create constructions of different types of materials available to us : i.e. hybrid materials. In the long term, our mastery of reality will result in nano-technology, where just about any material can be constructed, and new strange types of materials as well.
A sword like this could be an important milestone in the history of materials technology.
Games, virtual reality and fantasy worlds are the new literature in many ways.
They should be both software and art in the same way that a book is composed of writing and art. Books are constructed with textual grammatical substrate that is open source to everyone - the art is in using this to construct an experience. The virtual reality game experience is little different, now the substrate is software -- more dynamic than text. Another analogy can be drawn from board games, role playing games, virtual environments, MUDs and all manner of immersive environments.
Newsline: car owner sued after death of girl
Robert Wilson -- a wealthy and respected professor at MIT -- was recently sued for damages after theives stole his BMW and killed a girl on their joyride. The theives broke through a sophisticated alarm system and took the BMW for a joyride through outer neighbourhoods of Boston while under the influence of alchohol. During the joyride, Samantha Caily was knocked over and killed - a tragic death for a young girl barely 15. Samantha's parents sued Robert Wilson for damages, claiming that he was responsible for their childs death. "If he'd employed a better alarm system, Samantha would be with us today. It's clearly his fault. Those boys are known theives, and they can't help themselves, but Robert should know better", said Martha Caily. The theives, who were later caught, have a history of car theft, they were released with a traffic infringement: they're poor and of no fixed abode - barely able to afford the bus ticket home.
^sarcastic humourThis seems more useful as a high end device for hired or chauffered cars, for busy people.
Consider a) arriving off the plane in a foreign country, and catching up with news and execs back home via. videoconferencing/etc in the car. b) being entertained with with it on medium distance business trips (