The cordless charging devices are a good idea. If there's a standard. If there's one bowl or pad which recharges everything, we've made real progress. If we end up with one per device, they just waste space.
At least three small companies (SplashPower, WildCharge, and WiPower) are pushing that idea.
Incompatibly. There's no one in a strong enough position to make them play together.
"4 points, in which any two vertices are connected by an edge." Isn't that a tetrahedron?
There are tetrahedral crystals. The last picture on that page is an unusually nice one.
The possible crystal forms for an element depend on the bond angles, and I don't think carbon will hold a stable tetrahedral lattice. Not sure, though.
A writing tool for writers
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There's something to be said for a writing tool for writers.
First, professional writers need only minimal formatting capability. Formatting is someone else's job. Any formatting done by the author will just interfere with page makeup later. Writers need to be able to insert chapter breaks, and that's about it.
Second, the word processor should not interrupt the flow of writing. Auto-completion is usually not wanted. Spell checking is probably better done after the fact, not during writing.
Third, not losing the text is important. The writer should not have to "save". A word processor which guaranteed it would never lose the text, backed up by continuous remote backup to multiple sites and an insurance policy, would probably have a following among pros.
There are newsroom systems like this, on which reporters compose stories.
Many 1080p monitors can already go much faster than 24/30FPS. When being driven by game consoles, they use that speed. The PS3 can in theory output 1080p 60FPS, although it doesn't really have enough crunch power to deliver 60 different frames per second on most games. The point, though, is that monitors now have much higher frame rate capabilities than movie storage media.
It's going to be embarrassing when EA Football looks better than NFL football.
I'd been hoping we'd skip HD and Blu-Ray and go to one of those higher-density mediums one hears about on Slashdot every few weeks. Both formats still require too much compression.
We're not there yet. We're probably there when we get 2K high images at 72FPS without compression artifacts. Somewhere around 72FPS, the annoying strobing on pans disappears. Or, in other words, football games finally look right. Football games are hard because the background is moving, there's action moving in different directions, and viewers care about the detail. The motion compression algorithms can't really handle that situation.
The digital cinema industry has a standard for this. They have two formats, "2K", which is simply 1080p, that is, 1080x2048 pixels, and "4K", which is 2160x4096 pixels. They define two speeds; 24FPS and 48FPS. Color depth is 12 bits. Compression is JPEG 2000. Maximum image data per frame is 1,302,083 bytes (which is actually smaller than you'd expect). Audio is sampled at 96KHz with a depth of 24 bits, and is not compressed. There are 16 audio channels. That's the Hollywood/SMTPE definition of a "movie" in the digital era.
In actual practice, most films now being distributed digitally are going out in "2K" mode, at 24 FPS,with 8 audio channels. The spec has headroom to double each of those numbers.
A 2-hour movie at all the highest ratings is about 500GB.
So that's what needs to be delivered to the consumer. Neither HD nor Blu-Ray can do that yet.
There are some security issues with Unicode URLs. See this article. There's been an attempt to define a matching process for Unicode domain names such that homoglyphs compare equal. This deters spoofing by using similar-looking Unicode characters, and makes it possible to type in domains.
Read the paper, and it doesn't say anything new. There's no math, no proposed experimental tests, and no really new thinking about the subject.
There's still much frustration in fundamental physics, though. For over half a century, physicists have been trying to come up with a model that has fewer arbitrary assumptions at the bottom. Preferably one that makes some experimentally testable predictions. We still don't know where the fundamental constants come from. Maybe it's just many-worlds and the anthropic principle - we're living in one of the few forks that works.
The simulation idea might be verifiable if the simulation cheated. If the simulation had something like level-of-detail processing, so that far less is really being simulated than appears to be going on, that might be detectable by experiment. This was best explored in SF in Simulacron-3, in 1954. But we're not seeing that.
In fact, we're seeing more of the opposite. The universe seems to have too much gratuitous fine detail. There's much more going on at the subatomic level than seems to be necessary. The universe is bigger than it needs to be. If we're in a simulation, it's not resource-constrained.
The anti-smoking vaccine, NicVax, is in phase 2B clinical testing, and appears to work. Sort of:
"High antibody responders (top 30%) continued to show statistically
significant abstinence at nine months:
9-Month continuous abstinence rate: NicVAX=20% (12/61, p=0.0076) vs.
Placebo=6% (6/100)" That's not impressive, yet it's better than most anti-smoking programs.
Nicotine addiction is the toughest one to break. Programs for getting people off cocaine are about 40% successful. Programs for getting people off smoking are about 10-20% successful. Also, addicts tend to "age out" of cocaine and heroin addiction; after age 40, most of them eventually give it up. Not nicotine; people smoke their way to the grave.
One problem with a vaccine approach is that encourage overdoses, to overcome the antibodies. For nicotine, this is less of a problem, because smoking has a limited intake rate. But for cocaine, it's a real issue.
It's encouraging, though, that no side effects of this vaccine have been detected so far vs. the placebo.
The real promise for this vaccine is as a preventative measure.
The average age for a new smoker is 13. Only 10% start after age 18. So if this works, a school inoculation program might be the way to prevent smoking.
StopBadware should hear about this. It's exactly the sort of thing that gets a company a big red X on the StopBadware site. Plus some really bad publicity.
StopBadware is sponsored by Harvard Law School, Oxford University, and Consumers' Union. There's heavy legal firepower available if needed.
The TRIPS agreement, the international agreement on copyrights pushed through via the WTO at US insistence, requires participating countries to provide copyright for at least 50 years. The US goes beyond that. Let's start by trimming that back. We need a "Copyright Term Harmonization Act", which cuts US copyrights back to the minimum requirements of the TRIPS treaty.
Britain has 50 year copyright today. There was a big push from the record industry recently to extend that to 95 years, but the record industry lost. It stays at 50 years. Four years from now, the first Beatles song goes public domain. The world will not end.
This is a reasonable political goal for the US. Five years is probably asking too much, but fifty would work. A big chunk of the history of jazz and blues would go public domain. Early Elvis would come out. Over the next two decades, the early days of rock would be freed.
The chart in the article, of the fraction of people on two social networking sites, shows what's really happening. There's Myspace and Facebook, and then there's everybody else. Whether Myspace and Facebook decide to interoperate is a major business decision. For everybody else, what matters is interoperating with Myspace and Facebook. Few people care whether Orkut and Bebo interconnect.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. If successful, they become cool, they grow, the losers move in, they become uncool, and they decline. Has-been sites include Geocities, EZBoard, Nerve, Tribe, and, of course AOL. Facebook just caught up with Myspace last month, after a steep rise, but right now Facebook is headed downward.
Wikia has been something of a dud. What Wikia really does is monetize fancruft. Their big wikis are for Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], Everquest, Marvel comics, Yu-Gi-Oh, and similar subjects. They're the resting place for fan articles thrown out of Wikipedia.
Wikia's search engine, based on the user demographic they have now, is going to have great coverage of furry fan fiction.
There's already a good manually-updated search engine. It's called Open Directory. It's quite useful as a data source for answering the question "what is this web site about"? It tends to run months behind changes to the web, since it's manually updated. While not many people query DMOZ manually, it's used by Yahoo, Google, etc. to get some basic information about a web site.
As an example of how great Wikia search is going to be, Wales suggested searching for "Tampa hotels". The major search engines return too many bottom-feeder reseller and directory sites for searches like that. As I point out occasionally, we've already solved that problem over at SiteTruth, which looks for business legitimacy. Type in "Tampa hotels" there and watch it push the marginal sites to the bottom of the search results. We have that one handled.
Wikipedia works because people are willing to do substantial work for free for a non-profit organization. That doesn't work for a commercial business. You can get people to write about themselves (Myspace, Facebook, etc.) but beyond that, "crowdsourcing" doesn't go very far.
The parts of Google that matter aren't open source. The search engine not only isn't open source, the rating algorithms are secret. None of the web apps are open source on the server side. Try to scrape Google's data and see what happens. Read their robots.txt file.
Sure, they have some open source stuff, but it's more in the nature of client code that slaves some open source app to Google's proprietary servers. You're not going to see an open source enterprise search engine from Google, not one you can run on your own servers. Google charges $30,000 (!) for a server that can search 500,000 documents.
In hardware, the real action is in memory. Cost per bit for flash memory and disk drives continued to drop rapidly.
In CPUs, we have two futures - shared memory multiprocessors, and GPU-like massively parallel machines. The GPU-like devices have turned out to be more useful than expected.
Non-shared-memory multiprocessors with small memories, like the Cell, weren't too useful.
This isn't surprising; that idea was a dud in supercomputers, where it was tried about ten times over the last 20 years.
The big screen problem has finally been solved. It took fifty years, but the TV you can hang on the wall is finally the standard product at an easily affordable price.
The Blu-Ray vs. HD controversy has stalemated. Both are losing. Something better than both may come along before either achieves significant market penetration.
Batteries improved a little in energy density, but they're blowing up more. We may be reaching a limit there, as weight reduction reduces the safety margins. Fuel cell products remained vaporware.
Networking is somewhat stable; most consumers have enough bandwidth right now. This may change as the demand to download HDTV-sized content increases. There's more action in the phone side of networking, as video to the phone becomes widespread.
Desktop computing didn't really change much in 2007.
OK, they need to get the price down to $100. Instead of selling them in the US at $400 at a 100% profit margin to raise money for charity, they need to just sell the things for $199 commercially and take over the low end market. In a year or two, they'll be down to $99 through sheer volume.
Those things ought to be in bubble-packs at the local drugstore, alongside the cheap calculators, electronic dictionaries, and other low end electronics. This wouldn't stroke Negroponte's ego, but it would get the things out there in volume. Soon enough, they'd be available all over the world, purely on price.
Jepsen probably sees this. Negroponte wants to meet with heads of state and be in the press.
There are conformal coatings for waterproofing. They're routinely used in automotive and military applications. The main limits on conformal coating come from components that interact with the outside world - connectors, microphones, speakers, displays, and switches. All those parts are available in waterproof forms.
The ruggedized forms of those components tend to be a bit larger. But not by much any more. Check out the Motorola i580 ruggedized cell phone. Note how the speaker and microphone take up more case space than on non-ruggedized phones, and the keyboard is thicker. But most of the extra bulk of the device comes from wrapping the whole thing in about 4mm of rubber for drop resistance.
The real issue is that RMS's political issues (expelling Bushnell for speaking out against the GFDL, for example) mean that HURD, while quite innovative at its core, is doomed to take over the "King of Vaporware" title from DNF.....
Actually, the trouble with the HURD was that they tried to build a microkernel starting from Mach, which started from BSD, which started from V7 Unix. It's possible to do a good microkernel (see QNX), but not that way. After a decade or so, they realized the problem and tried to switch to L4, which in theory is a good idea, but nobody cares.
Getting the architectural decisions right for a microkernel is really hard, and if any of them are botched, the project never recovers. If you get them right, very solid systems result (IBM's VM, for example). But the open source process hasn't done well on tough architecture problems. Open source does "features", and this isn't about "features".
If we don't find a new energy source to replace fossil fuels, industrial civilization won't last another century.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there's been a new major power source at least once every fifty years. Until the last fifty.
Think about it. In 1800, everything was human or animal powered, except for a windmill or waterwheel here and there, and a few wood-burning Newcomen steam engines pumping away. By 1850, the European countries and the United States had substantial railroad systems, and coal and steam powered factories. By 1900, most major cities had electric lights and street cars, and gasoline engine powered cars were starting to appear. By 1950, petroleum powered everything mobile, gas turbines powered aircraft, and nuclear power was just starting to work.
So what do we have now that we didn't have fifty years ago? Solar cells were demonstrated in 1954. The first commercial nuclear reactor started up in December 1957. Sputnik I had been launched. Megawatt-scale windmills had been tried (1941), but weren't worth the trouble in an era of cheap oil. Oil had been found in the Middle East. Natural gas was being moved through long pipelines. Even ethanol from corn had been tried. Every major energy source we have today was working in 1957. Nothing new and big enough to matter has come along since.
In the 1970s, there was hope that Government spending via the Department of Energy would yield something. Didn't work. In the 1980s, there was hope that the free market would yield some solution. Didn't happen.
What's actually happening is that all the old ideas that used to be too expensive are now competitive with oil. There's oil from tar sands. Deep offshore drilling. Ethanol from corn. Wind farms. Solar panels. At $100/bbl, these all look good. But energy is expensive from here on.
Lanier invented gloves-and-goggles virtual reality. I tried his original VR system back in the 1980s (novel concept, terrible lag), and met him back then. Lanier tries too hard to be cool, but he has done real work.
He does have a point about the Unix/Linux/open source ecosystem. Face it, Linux is pretty much like Unix, which dates from the 1970s. The Berkeley stuff from the 1980s (notably BIND and Sendmail) is still in use, buried under layers of cruft and still breaking. C programs are still crashing all the time. C++ didn't help much.
X-Windows, which was never very good, has survived all its successors.
I never dreamed when I started using UNIX in 1978 that thirty years later it would still be a major system. I thought the future of operating systems would be more like Multics, with rings of protection, on cheaper hardware. Or like Tandem, a transaction processing system where the mean time between system failures was measured in decades.
Or like UCLA Locus, where distributed processing really worked. But no. It's just minor variations on UNIX, forever.
That's what Lanier is pointing out. We have roughly the same problems at the bottom we had thirty years ago.
Now this is a truly awful article. The article isn't a review of Fedora 8. It's someone blithering that they're going to do a review of Fedora 8. This is a review of the press release.
The author has trouble with English, HTML, and the concept of free software. If you think the text is painful, try "view source". The page was apparently generated with Microsoft FrontPage, then hacked by hand. Badly. There's code from at least five sources, some of it in Visual Basic.
Notice the link right after the article: "Click here for prices on Linux distributions".
The Almighty Institute of Music Retail cited in the article actually exists. It's like the marketing and promotion part of a record label, but without the label.
Slashdot Mirror
The cordless charging devices are a good idea. If there's a standard. If there's one bowl or pad which recharges everything, we've made real progress. If we end up with one per device, they just waste space.
At least three small companies (SplashPower, WildCharge, and WiPower) are pushing that idea. Incompatibly. There's no one in a strong enough position to make them play together.
"4 points, in which any two vertices are connected by an edge." Isn't that a tetrahedron?
There are tetrahedral crystals. The last picture on that page is an unusually nice one.
The possible crystal forms for an element depend on the bond angles, and I don't think carbon will hold a stable tetrahedral lattice. Not sure, though.
There's something to be said for a writing tool for writers.
First, professional writers need only minimal formatting capability. Formatting is someone else's job. Any formatting done by the author will just interfere with page makeup later. Writers need to be able to insert chapter breaks, and that's about it.
Second, the word processor should not interrupt the flow of writing. Auto-completion is usually not wanted. Spell checking is probably better done after the fact, not during writing.
Third, not losing the text is important. The writer should not have to "save". A word processor which guaranteed it would never lose the text, backed up by continuous remote backup to multiple sites and an insurance policy, would probably have a following among pros.
There are newsroom systems like this, on which reporters compose stories.
The real problem, as someone pointed out on Groklaw, is that Intel doesn't have a suitable CPU offering at the AMD Geode's price point.
Many 1080p monitors can already go much faster than 24/30FPS. When being driven by game consoles, they use that speed. The PS3 can in theory output 1080p 60FPS, although it doesn't really have enough crunch power to deliver 60 different frames per second on most games. The point, though, is that monitors now have much higher frame rate capabilities than movie storage media.
It's going to be embarrassing when EA Football looks better than NFL football.
I'd been hoping we'd skip HD and Blu-Ray and go to one of those higher-density mediums one hears about on Slashdot every few weeks. Both formats still require too much compression.
We're not there yet. We're probably there when we get 2K high images at 72FPS without compression artifacts. Somewhere around 72FPS, the annoying strobing on pans disappears. Or, in other words, football games finally look right. Football games are hard because the background is moving, there's action moving in different directions, and viewers care about the detail. The motion compression algorithms can't really handle that situation.
The digital cinema industry has a standard for this. They have two formats, "2K", which is simply 1080p, that is, 1080x2048 pixels, and "4K", which is 2160x4096 pixels. They define two speeds; 24FPS and 48FPS. Color depth is 12 bits. Compression is JPEG 2000. Maximum image data per frame is 1,302,083 bytes (which is actually smaller than you'd expect). Audio is sampled at 96KHz with a depth of 24 bits, and is not compressed. There are 16 audio channels. That's the Hollywood/SMTPE definition of a "movie" in the digital era.
In actual practice, most films now being distributed digitally are going out in "2K" mode, at 24 FPS,with 8 audio channels. The spec has headroom to double each of those numbers.
A 2-hour movie at all the highest ratings is about 500GB. So that's what needs to be delivered to the consumer. Neither HD nor Blu-Ray can do that yet.
There are some security issues with Unicode URLs. See this article. There's been an attempt to define a matching process for Unicode domain names such that homoglyphs compare equal. This deters spoofing by using similar-looking Unicode characters, and makes it possible to type in domains.
Read the paper, and it doesn't say anything new. There's no math, no proposed experimental tests, and no really new thinking about the subject.
There's still much frustration in fundamental physics, though. For over half a century, physicists have been trying to come up with a model that has fewer arbitrary assumptions at the bottom. Preferably one that makes some experimentally testable predictions. We still don't know where the fundamental constants come from. Maybe it's just many-worlds and the anthropic principle - we're living in one of the few forks that works.
The simulation idea might be verifiable if the simulation cheated. If the simulation had something like level-of-detail processing, so that far less is really being simulated than appears to be going on, that might be detectable by experiment. This was best explored in SF in Simulacron-3, in 1954. But we're not seeing that.
In fact, we're seeing more of the opposite. The universe seems to have too much gratuitous fine detail. There's much more going on at the subatomic level than seems to be necessary. The universe is bigger than it needs to be. If we're in a simulation, it's not resource-constrained.
There are at least eight different "versions" of Windows Server 2008:, depending on what features are crippled:
This change only affects the crippling level on #8.
HTML in Cyrillic...
You can write XML with Cyrillic tags. XML with tags in Mandarin Chinese shows up now and then.
The anti-smoking vaccine, NicVax, is in phase 2B clinical testing, and appears to work. Sort of: "High antibody responders (top 30%) continued to show statistically significant abstinence at nine months: 9-Month continuous abstinence rate: NicVAX=20% (12/61, p=0.0076) vs. Placebo=6% (6/100)" That's not impressive, yet it's better than most anti-smoking programs.
Nicotine addiction is the toughest one to break. Programs for getting people off cocaine are about 40% successful. Programs for getting people off smoking are about 10-20% successful. Also, addicts tend to "age out" of cocaine and heroin addiction; after age 40, most of them eventually give it up. Not nicotine; people smoke their way to the grave.
One problem with a vaccine approach is that encourage overdoses, to overcome the antibodies. For nicotine, this is less of a problem, because smoking has a limited intake rate. But for cocaine, it's a real issue.
It's encouraging, though, that no side effects of this vaccine have been detected so far vs. the placebo.
The real promise for this vaccine is as a preventative measure. The average age for a new smoker is 13. Only 10% start after age 18. So if this works, a school inoculation program might be the way to prevent smoking.
StopBadware should hear about this. It's exactly the sort of thing that gets a company a big red X on the StopBadware site. Plus some really bad publicity.
StopBadware is sponsored by Harvard Law School, Oxford University, and Consumers' Union. There's heavy legal firepower available if needed.
Already happening. From a Linden Labs press release: The company also introduced algorithms that identify suspicious activity...
A virtual world is a total surveillance society. Everything can be logged. More than that, what you do there can be analyzed automatically.
Big Brother is watching. Big Brother is always watching.
The TRIPS agreement, the international agreement on copyrights pushed through via the WTO at US insistence, requires participating countries to provide copyright for at least 50 years. The US goes beyond that. Let's start by trimming that back. We need a "Copyright Term Harmonization Act", which cuts US copyrights back to the minimum requirements of the TRIPS treaty.
Britain has 50 year copyright today. There was a big push from the record industry recently to extend that to 95 years, but the record industry lost. It stays at 50 years. Four years from now, the first Beatles song goes public domain. The world will not end.
This is a reasonable political goal for the US. Five years is probably asking too much, but fifty would work. A big chunk of the history of jazz and blues would go public domain. Early Elvis would come out. Over the next two decades, the early days of rock would be freed.
The chart in the article, of the fraction of people on two social networking sites, shows what's really happening. There's Myspace and Facebook, and then there's everybody else. Whether Myspace and Facebook decide to interoperate is a major business decision. For everybody else, what matters is interoperating with Myspace and Facebook. Few people care whether Orkut and Bebo interconnect.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. If successful, they become cool, they grow, the losers move in, they become uncool, and they decline. Has-been sites include Geocities, EZBoard, Nerve, Tribe, and, of course AOL. Facebook just caught up with Myspace last month, after a steep rise, but right now Facebook is headed downward.
Wikia has been something of a dud. What Wikia really does is monetize fancruft. Their big wikis are for Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], Everquest, Marvel comics, Yu-Gi-Oh, and similar subjects. They're the resting place for fan articles thrown out of Wikipedia.
Wikia's search engine, based on the user demographic they have now, is going to have great coverage of furry fan fiction.
There's already a good manually-updated search engine. It's called Open Directory. It's quite useful as a data source for answering the question "what is this web site about"? It tends to run months behind changes to the web, since it's manually updated. While not many people query DMOZ manually, it's used by Yahoo, Google, etc. to get some basic information about a web site.
As an example of how great Wikia search is going to be, Wales suggested searching for "Tampa hotels". The major search engines return too many bottom-feeder reseller and directory sites for searches like that. As I point out occasionally, we've already solved that problem over at SiteTruth, which looks for business legitimacy. Type in "Tampa hotels" there and watch it push the marginal sites to the bottom of the search results. We have that one handled.
Wikipedia works because people are willing to do substantial work for free for a non-profit organization. That doesn't work for a commercial business. You can get people to write about themselves (Myspace, Facebook, etc.) but beyond that, "crowdsourcing" doesn't go very far.
The parts of Google that matter aren't open source. The search engine not only isn't open source, the rating algorithms are secret. None of the web apps are open source on the server side. Try to scrape Google's data and see what happens. Read their robots.txt file.
Sure, they have some open source stuff, but it's more in the nature of client code that slaves some open source app to Google's proprietary servers. You're not going to see an open source enterprise search engine from Google, not one you can run on your own servers. Google charges $30,000 (!) for a server that can search 500,000 documents.
OK, they need to get the price down to $100. Instead of selling them in the US at $400 at a 100% profit margin to raise money for charity, they need to just sell the things for $199 commercially and take over the low end market. In a year or two, they'll be down to $99 through sheer volume.
Those things ought to be in bubble-packs at the local drugstore, alongside the cheap calculators, electronic dictionaries, and other low end electronics. This wouldn't stroke Negroponte's ego, but it would get the things out there in volume. Soon enough, they'd be available all over the world, purely on price.
Jepsen probably sees this. Negroponte wants to meet with heads of state and be in the press.
There are conformal coatings for waterproofing. They're routinely used in automotive and military applications. The main limits on conformal coating come from components that interact with the outside world - connectors, microphones, speakers, displays, and switches. All those parts are available in waterproof forms.
The ruggedized forms of those components tend to be a bit larger. But not by much any more. Check out the Motorola i580 ruggedized cell phone. Note how the speaker and microphone take up more case space than on non-ruggedized phones, and the keyboard is thicker. But most of the extra bulk of the device comes from wrapping the whole thing in about 4mm of rubber for drop resistance.
The real issue is that RMS's political issues (expelling Bushnell for speaking out against the GFDL, for example) mean that HURD, while quite innovative at its core, is doomed to take over the "King of Vaporware" title from DNF.....
Actually, the trouble with the HURD was that they tried to build a microkernel starting from Mach, which started from BSD, which started from V7 Unix. It's possible to do a good microkernel (see QNX), but not that way. After a decade or so, they realized the problem and tried to switch to L4, which in theory is a good idea, but nobody cares.
Getting the architectural decisions right for a microkernel is really hard, and if any of them are botched, the project never recovers. If you get them right, very solid systems result (IBM's VM, for example). But the open source process hasn't done well on tough architecture problems. Open source does "features", and this isn't about "features".
If we don't find a new energy source to replace fossil fuels, industrial civilization won't last another century.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there's been a new major power source at least once every fifty years. Until the last fifty.
Think about it. In 1800, everything was human or animal powered, except for a windmill or waterwheel here and there, and a few wood-burning Newcomen steam engines pumping away. By 1850, the European countries and the United States had substantial railroad systems, and coal and steam powered factories. By 1900, most major cities had electric lights and street cars, and gasoline engine powered cars were starting to appear. By 1950, petroleum powered everything mobile, gas turbines powered aircraft, and nuclear power was just starting to work.
So what do we have now that we didn't have fifty years ago? Solar cells were demonstrated in 1954. The first commercial nuclear reactor started up in December 1957. Sputnik I had been launched. Megawatt-scale windmills had been tried (1941), but weren't worth the trouble in an era of cheap oil. Oil had been found in the Middle East. Natural gas was being moved through long pipelines. Even ethanol from corn had been tried. Every major energy source we have today was working in 1957. Nothing new and big enough to matter has come along since.
In the 1970s, there was hope that Government spending via the Department of Energy would yield something. Didn't work. In the 1980s, there was hope that the free market would yield some solution. Didn't happen.
What's actually happening is that all the old ideas that used to be too expensive are now competitive with oil. There's oil from tar sands. Deep offshore drilling. Ethanol from corn. Wind farms. Solar panels. At $100/bbl, these all look good. But energy is expensive from here on.
Lanier invented gloves-and-goggles virtual reality. I tried his original VR system back in the 1980s (novel concept, terrible lag), and met him back then. Lanier tries too hard to be cool, but he has done real work.
He does have a point about the Unix/Linux/open source ecosystem. Face it, Linux is pretty much like Unix, which dates from the 1970s. The Berkeley stuff from the 1980s (notably BIND and Sendmail) is still in use, buried under layers of cruft and still breaking. C programs are still crashing all the time. C++ didn't help much. X-Windows, which was never very good, has survived all its successors.
I never dreamed when I started using UNIX in 1978 that thirty years later it would still be a major system. I thought the future of operating systems would be more like Multics, with rings of protection, on cheaper hardware. Or like Tandem, a transaction processing system where the mean time between system failures was measured in decades. Or like UCLA Locus, where distributed processing really worked. But no. It's just minor variations on UNIX, forever.
That's what Lanier is pointing out. We have roughly the same problems at the bottom we had thirty years ago.
Now this is a truly awful article. The article isn't a review of Fedora 8. It's someone blithering that they're going to do a review of Fedora 8. This is a review of the press release.
The author has trouble with English, HTML, and the concept of free software. If you think the text is painful, try "view source". The page was apparently generated with Microsoft FrontPage, then hacked by hand. Badly. There's code from at least five sources, some of it in Visual Basic.
Notice the link right after the article: "Click here for prices on Linux distributions".
The Almighty Institute of Music Retail cited in the article actually exists. It's like the marketing and promotion part of a record label, but without the label.