Memes are ideas that flow through and define a culture. Blogs are just mechanism of doing this. In the past other media- gossip, schools, and newspapers- facilitated the flow of memes. Only a small fraction of memes are original, but are endless propagated. Wired tries to capture a few of this in its monthly section on new memes.
The collection of memes defining a culture, an era, and a place is the Zeitgeist. It is interesting to look at other Zeitgeists to see what people took for granted compared what believe now. Future cultures will be amused by our own Zeitgeist too.
Many philosophers and science fiction writers have dealt with topic of perfect memory and/or eternal life. They explore the idea that the human psyche is fragile and cant deal with eons of emotions and experiences. Forgetting can be a release. The Dune series has people who crazy seeing all memories of their ancestors. Some of Ann Rice's immortal vampires go catonic or commit suicide. Several religions have myths that the dead forget- Greek souls drink from the river of forgetfulness; reincarnated Hindu souls general dont rememer past lives as not to be overwhelmed by them.
I am not criticizing Slashdot in this regard. Its just that I've been reading the scientific and popular literature (including online) for more decades that I care to count. I notice many so-called original ideas in Slashdot postings have been thought of before. Particularly if you a younger person, or have focused your media attention narrowly, you may have not noticed these ideas.
In fact, this posting is an old idea! A Hebrew philospoher said in Ecclesiasts 1:9 twenty five centuries ago "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done there is nothing new under the sun"
I've always suspected the first interesting Artificial Intelligence will be something in entertainment. I may be an character-agent in a video game or some robotic toy. Although much of the artificial intelligence R&D is driven by business and military funding, I suspect the really creative breakthough will be in more challenging "playing".
Recent museum guides like at the Dallas Noeller Sculpture Museum use mp3 players with RFID readers.
The mp3 gives random access sound loops, so you aren't tied to a sequential audio tape.
The RFID tags on art works give you the location index.
Commodity DRAM memory has been around $0.10 / megabyte since 2002. I remember slashdot stories about $100 gigabytes at that time. Until Wintel breaks the 2GB/32-bit limit the core memory cost is not a major factor in personal computing. in contrast, flash memory has fallen from $1.00 to $0.25 that time period.
The price plateaus when a chip generation matures. The next 4x generation seems a bit delayed.
Something like 20 Mars rocks have been found on Earth. Most were on top of Antarctic ice where they are readily found. Mars rocks have a Martian atmospheric composition in their tiny air vesicles. It is thought a rock could make the journey from Mars to Earth at least every million years, so thousands of more may have arrived. Most would go into the ocean or be eroded on land.
So once life evolves somewhere in the solar system, it is likely to infect every other semi-hospitable place, including the wet moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
It may be likely that life evolved on Mars first because it was smaller and cooled down faster after creation. Then a meteor ejection would have infected earth fairly quickly.
I dont understand why there is so little discussion about the Matrix. it was a innovative story and had lots of great F/X.
"Thats a feature"
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I am not surprised at the number of so-called bugs that turn out to be holes in the specifications or tests. Then I tell the complaintant "thats the design specification". Then they say "no, thats not" and give me the updated specification.
In fact, popular bug-tracking databases like Scopus usually merge bugs and enhancement requests together, due to this ambiguity.
I wish I could have a gizmo that would disale cell-phones withing ten or so feet. It would be very useful in movie theaters, on the bus, in restaurants, etc.
Japan went from abject poverty at the end of WWII to being a level competitor to the USA by 1970. the Yen went to throw-way currency to on par with the dollar in the same period. When India and China throw way the last remnants of their socialist straight-jackets, they could reach world levels in less than a generation.
Google IPO stock likely to be highly price. That gives you currency for snatching other search startups before MicroSoft does. Also makes one pricey to be acquired. Google's financial options are limited until it creates a large amount of cash by going public.
The Cassini probe reaches Saturn this summer promising years of photos. It last the NASA billion dollar mega-probes. It took two decades to fund, design, launch and arrive.
They've tried to add scents to virtual reality entertainments for some time. There was a movie or two that had scratch-and-sniff cards for various scenes, signaled by a subtitle. The Disney Bugs Life VR ride emits scents at various times. (The Soaring over California ride too?) I thought the tactile F/X were more interesting.
The discount eyeglass makers in my city are offering two pairs of glasses with frames & lenses (subject to some extreme prescriptions) plus eye exam for $69. Can this new technology keep up with the relentless cost-cutting in conventional technology?
The four-digit code roughly refers to the type of stroke in each quadrant of a Chinese character. Its not an rigorous algorithm, but serves as a mneumonic.
In the the fifth Star Trek movie Scotty used Morse code to send a secret message to Kirk. Morse code used to be required for many military positions until recently.
My recollection is that MS-Windows and XWindows were both invented around 1985. MS-Windows was typical Bill Gates vapor-announcement to co-opt Macintosh popularity (introduced in 1984). However, XWindows did not really supplant MS-DOS until version 3.1 around 1993, when both hardware and software became decent. Then it became a best seller and a trademark.
Also there wasnt really a single commercial entity behind XWindows to sue. It would look bad to sue MIT.
I was at Stanford during the development of W/X, as a user of early version, but not a developer of X. It was a time of rapidly evolving technology, so some standards they guessed right, while others were kludges. The technology was the workstation, a computer small enough to put into the office (the size of half-height file cabinet) and enough power to run UNIX. PCs were way too underpowered to run UNIX and bit-mapped graphics. Apollo (absorbed into HP) was the UNIX king, but all its standards were proprietary. Sun was just a couple years old and its standards were half-open, half-proprietary- a practice they continue to this day. DEC (absorbed into HP) was willing to tolerate UNIX on its min-VAXes, but not write all the missing parts- especially window graphics. So they essentially delegated that to Stanford and MIT with hardware and R&D grants. So there was a lot of R&D then on how to do client-server computing and graphics.
The primary problem at that time was the availability of a suitable object-oriented programming language. Everyone knew that was the future of software. The UNIX crowd preferred something related to C. C++ was very unstable, while ObjectiveC, based on on SmallTalk, was good but proprietary. The fledgeling company NeXT (in the Stanford industrial park, later absorbing Apple Computer) decided on ObjectiveC. The Stanford W/X group decided to use neither of these but invent a quasi OOP extension to C in the Xt Toolkit. And XWindows has suffered ever since.
Slashdot Mirror
The first cut was 4 1/2 hours, including the controversial Chrisopher Lee cut. They had to shrink it closer to 3 hours for thew theater.
Memes are ideas that flow through and define a culture. Blogs are just mechanism of doing this. In the past other media- gossip, schools, and newspapers- facilitated the flow of memes. Only a small fraction of memes are original, but are endless propagated. Wired tries to capture a few of this in its monthly section on new memes.
The collection of memes defining a culture, an era, and a place is the Zeitgeist. It is interesting to look at other Zeitgeists to see what people took for granted compared what believe now. Future cultures will be amused by our own Zeitgeist too.
Many philosophers and science fiction writers have dealt with topic of perfect memory and/or eternal life. They explore the idea that the human psyche is fragile and cant deal with eons of emotions and experiences. Forgetting can be a release. The Dune series has people who crazy seeing all memories of their ancestors. Some of Ann Rice's immortal vampires go catonic or commit suicide. Several religions have myths that the dead forget- Greek souls drink from the river of forgetfulness; reincarnated Hindu souls general dont rememer past lives as not to be overwhelmed by them.
I am not criticizing Slashdot in this regard. Its just that I've been reading the scientific and popular literature (including online) for more decades that I care to count. I notice many so-called original ideas in Slashdot postings have been thought of before. Particularly if you a younger person, or have focused your media attention narrowly, you may have not noticed these ideas.
In fact, this posting is an old idea! A Hebrew philospoher said in Ecclesiasts 1:9 twenty five centuries ago "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done there is nothing new under the sun"
I've always suspected the first interesting Artificial Intelligence will be something in entertainment. I may be an character-agent in a video game or some robotic toy. Although much of the artificial intelligence R&D is driven by business and military funding, I suspect the really creative breakthough will be in more challenging "playing".
This toy reminds me of the upcoming Asimov-derived movie this summer "I, Robot". Its a robot crime movie with Will Smith as the human detective.
Recent museum guides like at the Dallas Noeller Sculpture Museum use mp3 players with RFID readers. The mp3 gives random access sound loops, so you aren't tied to a sequential audio tape. The RFID tags on art works give you the location index.
Commodity DRAM memory has been around $0.10 / megabyte since 2002. I remember slashdot stories about $100 gigabytes at that time. Until Wintel breaks the 2GB/32-bit limit the core memory cost is not a major factor in personal computing. in contrast, flash memory has fallen from $1.00 to $0.25 that time period.
The price plateaus when a chip generation matures. The next 4x generation seems a bit delayed.
Something like 20 Mars rocks have been found on Earth. Most were on top of Antarctic ice where they are readily found. Mars rocks have a Martian atmospheric composition in their tiny air vesicles. It is thought a rock could make the journey from Mars to Earth at least every million years, so thousands of more may have arrived. Most would go into the ocean or be eroded on land.
So once life evolves somewhere in the solar system, it is likely to infect every other semi-hospitable place, including the wet moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
It may be likely that life evolved on Mars first because it was smaller and cooled down faster after creation. Then a meteor ejection would have infected earth fairly quickly.
I dont understand why there is so little discussion about the Matrix. it was a innovative story and had lots of great F/X.
I am not surprised at the number of so-called bugs that turn out to be holes in the specifications or tests. Then I tell the complaintant "thats the design specification". Then they say "no, thats not" and give me the updated specification.
In fact, popular bug-tracking databases like Scopus usually merge bugs and enhancement requests together, due to this ambiguity.
I guess you look for a some thing that absorbs or reflects EM waves, rather than let them pass through.
I wish I could have a gizmo that would disale cell-phones withing ten or so feet. It would be very useful in movie theaters, on the bus, in restaurants, etc.
Japan went from abject poverty at the end of WWII to being a level competitor to the USA by 1970. the Yen went to throw-way currency to on par with the dollar in the same period. When India and China throw way the last remnants of their socialist straight-jackets, they could reach world levels in less than a generation.
Google IPO stock likely to be highly price. That gives you currency for snatching other search startups before MicroSoft does. Also makes one pricey to be acquired. Google's financial options are limited until it creates a large amount of cash by going public.
Ed Lu was up there for six months n 2003; Leroy Chiao is going up in the next round.
At the rate NASA is deteriorating and the China space programming, China will the the pre-eminent space power in 10-15 years.
The Cassini probe reaches Saturn this summer promising years of photos. It last the NASA billion dollar mega-probes. It took two decades to fund, design, launch and arrive.
They've tried to add scents to virtual reality entertainments for some time. There was a movie or two that had scratch-and-sniff cards for various scenes, signaled by a subtitle. The Disney Bugs Life VR ride emits scents at various times. (The Soaring over California ride too?) I thought the tactile F/X were more interesting.
The barrier is human, not technical. "Social Engineering" can get through the human aspect.
I use the term "clearest text" because the original source code may be so poorly written, that it is practically self-encrypting.
The discount eyeglass makers in my city are offering two pairs of glasses with frames & lenses (subject to some extreme prescriptions) plus eye exam for $69. Can this new technology keep up with the relentless cost-cutting in conventional technology?
The four-digit code roughly refers to the type of stroke in each quadrant of a Chinese character. Its not an rigorous algorithm, but serves as a mneumonic.
In the the fifth Star Trek movie Scotty used Morse code to send a secret message to Kirk. Morse code used to be required for many military positions until recently.
My recollection is that MS-Windows and XWindows were both invented around 1985. MS-Windows was typical Bill Gates vapor-announcement to co-opt Macintosh popularity (introduced in 1984). However, XWindows did not really supplant MS-DOS until version 3.1 around 1993, when both hardware and software became decent. Then it became a best seller and a trademark.
Also there wasnt really a single commercial entity behind XWindows to sue. It would look bad to sue MIT.
I was at Stanford during the development of W/X, as a user of early version, but not a developer of X. It was a time of rapidly evolving technology, so some standards they guessed right, while others were kludges. The technology was the workstation, a computer small enough to put into the office (the size of half-height file cabinet) and enough power to run UNIX. PCs were way too underpowered to run UNIX and bit-mapped graphics. Apollo (absorbed into HP) was the UNIX king, but all its standards were proprietary. Sun was just a couple years old and its standards were half-open, half-proprietary- a practice they continue to this day. DEC (absorbed into HP) was willing to tolerate UNIX on its min-VAXes, but not write all the missing parts- especially window graphics. So they essentially delegated that to Stanford and MIT with hardware and R&D grants. So there was a lot of R&D then on how to do client-server computing and graphics.
The primary problem at that time was the availability of a suitable object-oriented programming language. Everyone knew that was the future of software. The UNIX crowd preferred something related to C. C++ was very unstable, while ObjectiveC, based on on SmallTalk, was good but proprietary. The fledgeling company NeXT (in the Stanford industrial park, later absorbing Apple Computer) decided on ObjectiveC. The Stanford W/X group decided to use neither of these but invent a quasi OOP extension to C in the Xt Toolkit. And XWindows has suffered ever since.