When I clicked on the article for the reference I predicted a 75% of it coming from the UK and 90% chance coming from somewhere in Europe. I wonder why?
As we've seen in Blackberry and numerous other cases, the legal DEFAULT goes with the patent holder. Its a lot easier to enforce a patent than break it. All the holder has to do is to show someone is infringinig on the patent. The burden of proof and legal costs now lay on the infriger to show it is a bad patent.
The ebook situation riminds of the 1980s when InfoWeek would declare "198X: The year of the network" and the market hardly budged. I think the thing that finally pushed was for an office to share (then) costly laser printers on IBM PCs.
Reliable online music stores took a while.
Someday there will be a comphrensive collection of handsomely formatted ebooks.
I'm guess its not the reader, but the price. Ebooks are about the same as print versions. Plus you dont get used discounts.
If some publisher would sell an ebook for $5-$10, then the market might take off. There is no printing or wharehouse cost, so all that fee would be royalties and profit.
Reminds me a bit about the "college" Phil Greenspun started a few years back. It was going to be an "accelerated" version of M.I.T. bypassing the stuff irrelevant to startup computer businesses. It also sound a bit elitest and blowhard.
Anything that can channel the energy and creativity of smart young men and women into constructive pursuits has my vote. Sometimes people are turned off by formal channels like universities and low level entry jobs and dont realize their potential.
I get the impression when a name cant be said anymore, whether a religious or celebrity, then people start inventing euphemisms. For example, That is Not Named, The Founder, etc. Sometimes even these become sacred, e.g. the Hebrew tetragram, short for I AM WHO AM.
When I first heard this name often given to Latinos, I thought it might be blasphemous, but got over that quickly. That is the greek versus of the common hebrew name. In the 1990s the hebrew name was the top ten US boys names: Joshua.
I was reading in the current issue of Nature that NASA has mothballed nine space missions in 2006 in order to fund the shuttle transition program. Nature complains NASA is sabatoging one of its more successful and cost-effective branches.
Its been easier to tie genetic diseases to heredity patterns,
find the DNA, and reverse engineer the protein, rather than find the culprit protein directly. I believe this is how the bad Huntington's and Ty Sachs proteins were discovered.
The same criticism was leveled at baby boomers who were the first generation to grow up on television. And their grandparents were criticed for going to movies and listening to the radio.
If you go far enough back Plato quotes Socrates decrying the invention of writing because it could mean that people would commit less things to memory.
They've only launched once in the three years since the last shuttle accidents and had problems with that. I believe they've been five Russian manned launches (all space station) and two Chinese in the meantime. I have not seen a date for the next shuttle launch.
Reaching out to poor rural villages where 2/3rds of humanity lives is an admirable goal.
I've been reading that micro-loans, (micro-banks, micro- capitalism) is having a revolutionary effect in some of these villages too. The concept is to lend a small amount of money e.g. $50 to $200 to someone who would could not save that much money beforehand or a bank would find too much trouble to deal with. With that small amount of money the borrower buys some device like a peddle sewing machine, an irrigation pump, a kiln, etc. and improves their business. Early results are the entreupeneurs improve their incomes by an order magnitude. And the loan default rate is no worse than for a middle-class urban borrower. These micro-loans are really growing the rural economies where they are availble.
The one in my lifetime was how fast internet applications took off like a rocket once they finally did. I think the critical year was 1993 when the number of Mosaic downloads and websites starting increasing in the hundred thousands per month.
An amusing anecdote was Nick Negropronte's book tour for his interesting book Being Digital (1994) which was collection of his columns in Wired magazine up to that time. Nick was the founder of the MIT Media Lab and Wired magazine. The interesting thing about the book is THERE IS NO MENTION OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB. Thats because it took off so fast that it even caught pundits like Nick off guard.
This car directly burns hydrogen for its explosive mechanical force. It doesnt oxidize hysdrogen in a fuel cell to gnerate electricity for an electric motor. This way it can leverage a 130 years of experience with very robust internal combustion engines, instead of waiting for fuel cells and electric engine developments. To confess, I dont know how far the later is economically behind. It may not be that much with all the current R&D.
One of the more interesting contrarian books is Peter Huber's et al "Bottomless Well". Besides the usual contrarian mantra that "technology and the market always find solutions", he introduces the concept of the "refined energy pyramid". The pyramid has coal at the base, then petroleum, then electricity, then computing, and optical-laser at the top. (I forgot where he place nuclear). Each level of the pyramid represents more sophisticated and useful types of energy. The pyramid is getting wider (more production and use of each) and taller (more types of refined energy) as time goes on. The prime example is the automobile which used to have a 100% petroleum/mechanical power train, but now is at least 20% electrical energy and computing (and more for hybrids). The more refined energy make the car more efficient and more functional.
Part of SIASL was "used" in the first year of Star Trek where they rescue a teenager from a long ago crash. The teenager was given strong psychic powers by the resident aliensm, but he abuses these powers.
I wish they had made more of Heinlein's earlier novels into movies. My favorite from childhood was "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" about a nerdy teenager who wins a used spacesuit as a consolation prize, then accident gets embrolied in an intergalactic conflict with a bunch of zaney characters. I think the movie The Last Starfighter resembled this.
I also would like to see the cult classic Stranger in a Strange Land made into a movie. There's some political satire about religious fundamentalism that rings true today.
In the original book the soldiers have these wonderful robo-suits that turn them into supermen. The movie drops this, probably so you can see the actors' faces (ditto Dune). (I hear there a direct-to-video sequel that has the suits.)
At least the movie had some pretty good 3D graphics for its time.
Plus it converted Heinlein's liberterian-fascism into humorous political parody.
Magnetic bubbles move. Its principle resembles that of delay line memory used in computers before the invention of core and disk memory: You have huge circulating loops one can access at choosen spots to read a record. (People are working on optical delay line memory to store petabytes and picosecond speeds.)
I interpret this new magnetic technology to be a more compact implementation of programmable logic arrays . PLAs are standard tool in digital circuit design and can theoretically emulate any other digital state machine such as a CPU. Engineers like them because they are like blank circuits you can quickly burn a pattern in them. New high-density PLA chips in the 1980s lead to the rise of the mini-supercomputer industry, with companies like Convex using them. However, general purpose CPUs from Intel and Sun eventually exceeded 1990s PLA speeds and circuit capacities.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember first reading these stories in the new age literature in books published the 1960s. I presume they've been circulating for centuries.
When I clicked on the article for the reference I predicted a 75% of it coming from the UK and 90% chance coming from somewhere in Europe. I wonder why?
How they they claim to be a place of higher learning with a gaff that large?
As we've seen in Blackberry and numerous other cases, the legal DEFAULT goes with the patent holder. Its a lot easier to enforce a patent than break it. All the holder has to do is to show someone is infringinig on the patent. The burden of proof and legal costs now lay on the infriger to show it is a bad patent.
The ebook situation riminds of the 1980s when InfoWeek would declare "198X: The year of the network" and the market hardly budged. I think the thing that finally pushed was for an office to share (then) costly laser printers on IBM PCs.
Reliable online music stores took a while.
Someday there will be a comphrensive collection of handsomely formatted ebooks. I'm guess its not the reader, but the price. Ebooks are about the same as print versions. Plus you dont get used discounts. If some publisher would sell an ebook for $5-$10, then the market might take off. There is no printing or wharehouse cost, so all that fee would be royalties and profit.
I've heard its funny. Has anyoen seen it?
Reminds me a bit about the "college" Phil Greenspun started a few years back. It was going to be an "accelerated" version of M.I.T. bypassing the stuff irrelevant to startup computer businesses. It also sound a bit elitest and blowhard.
Anything that can channel the energy and creativity of smart young men and women into constructive pursuits has my vote. Sometimes people are turned off by formal channels like universities and low level entry jobs and dont realize their potential.
I get the impression when a name cant be said anymore, whether a religious or celebrity, then people start inventing euphemisms. For example, That is Not Named, The Founder, etc. Sometimes even these become sacred, e.g. the Hebrew tetragram, short for I AM WHO AM.
When I first heard this name often given to Latinos, I thought it might be blasphemous, but got over that quickly. That is the greek versus of the common hebrew name. In the 1990s the hebrew name was the top ten US boys names: Joshua.
I hear its one of the most common male names in the world. Its a tradition to give names from the early particpants in the religion.
I was reading in the current issue of Nature that NASA has mothballed nine space missions in 2006 in order to fund the shuttle transition program. Nature complains NASA is sabatoging one of its more successful and cost-effective branches.
>Two things to consider: educational background has little relevance to one's capabiltiy of doing many corporate jobs
Agreed. But in this competitative "holier than thou" world people wont tolerate lying, espcially in a mediocre company.
Its been easier to tie genetic diseases to heredity patterns, find the DNA, and reverse engineer the protein, rather than find the culprit protein directly. I believe this is how the bad Huntington's and Ty Sachs proteins were discovered.
The same criticism was leveled at baby boomers who were the first generation to grow up on television. And their grandparents were criticed for going to movies and listening to the radio.
If you go far enough back Plato quotes Socrates decrying the invention of writing because it could mean that people would commit less things to memory.
They've only launched once in the three years since the last shuttle accidents and had problems with that. I believe they've been five Russian manned launches (all space station) and two Chinese in the meantime. I have not seen a date for the next shuttle launch.
Reaching out to poor rural villages where 2/3rds of humanity lives is an admirable goal.
I've been reading that micro-loans, (micro-banks, micro- capitalism) is having a revolutionary effect in some of these villages too. The concept is to lend a small amount of money e.g. $50 to $200 to someone who would could not save that much money beforehand or a bank would find too much trouble to deal with. With that small amount of money the borrower buys some device like a peddle sewing machine, an irrigation pump, a kiln, etc. and improves their business. Early results are the entreupeneurs improve their incomes by an order magnitude. And the loan default rate is no worse than for a middle-class urban borrower. These micro-loans are really growing the rural economies where they are availble.
The one in my lifetime was how fast internet applications took off like a rocket once they finally did. I think the critical year was 1993 when the number of Mosaic downloads and websites starting increasing in the hundred thousands per month.
An amusing anecdote was Nick Negropronte's book tour for his interesting book Being Digital (1994) which was collection of his columns in Wired magazine up to that time. Nick was the founder of the MIT Media Lab and Wired magazine. The interesting thing about the book is THERE IS NO MENTION OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB. Thats because it took off so fast that it even caught pundits like Nick off guard.
This car directly burns hydrogen for its explosive mechanical force. It doesnt oxidize hysdrogen in a fuel cell to gnerate electricity for an electric motor. This way it can leverage a 130 years of experience with very robust internal combustion engines, instead of waiting for fuel cells and electric engine developments. To confess, I dont know how far the later is economically behind. It may not be that much with all the current R&D.
One of the more interesting contrarian books is Peter Huber's et al "Bottomless Well". Besides the usual contrarian mantra that "technology and the market always find solutions", he introduces the concept of the "refined energy pyramid". The pyramid has coal at the base, then petroleum, then electricity, then computing, and optical-laser at the top. (I forgot where he place nuclear). Each level of the pyramid represents more sophisticated and useful types of energy. The pyramid is getting wider (more production and use of each) and taller (more types of refined energy) as time goes on. The prime example is the automobile which used to have a 100% petroleum/mechanical power train, but now is at least 20% electrical energy and computing (and more for hybrids). The more refined energy make the car more efficient and more functional.
Part of SIASL was "used" in the first year of Star Trek where they rescue a teenager from a long ago crash. The teenager was given strong psychic powers by the resident aliensm, but he abuses these powers.
Even Clarke himself cant agree on a ending. In 3001 he modifies some of the alien's powers (no spoliers) to make a better plot.
I wish they had made more of Heinlein's earlier novels into movies. My favorite from childhood was "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" about a nerdy teenager who wins a used spacesuit as a consolation prize, then accident gets embrolied in an intergalactic conflict with a bunch of zaney characters. I think the movie The Last Starfighter resembled this.
I also would like to see the cult classic Stranger in a Strange Land made into a movie. There's some political satire about religious fundamentalism that rings true today.
In the original book the soldiers have these wonderful robo-suits that turn them into supermen. The movie drops this, probably so you can see the actors' faces (ditto Dune). (I hear there a direct-to-video sequel that has the suits.)
At least the movie had some pretty good 3D graphics for its time. Plus it converted Heinlein's liberterian-fascism into humorous political parody.
The book is pretty good. Its a coming of age story like Star Wars- a slave kid battles alien overlords of Earth and eventually wins.
Magnetic bubbles move. Its principle resembles that of delay line memory used in computers before the invention of core and disk memory: You have huge circulating loops one can access at choosen spots to read a record. (People are working on optical delay line memory to store petabytes and picosecond speeds.)
I interpret this new magnetic technology to be a more compact implementation of programmable logic arrays . PLAs are standard tool in digital circuit design and can theoretically emulate any other digital state machine such as a CPU. Engineers like them because they are like blank circuits you can quickly burn a pattern in them. New high-density PLA chips in the 1980s lead to the rise of the mini-supercomputer industry, with companies like Convex using them. However, general purpose CPUs from Intel and Sun eventually exceeded 1990s PLA speeds and circuit capacities.