At the height of the dot.com, workers weren't exactly ticking to their jobs to help the company prosper,
except in the cases of golden handcuffs (long term stock options).
Now they expect these companies to all the sudden reward them with generous severances.
After his father's death, Chris has published twelve annotated volumes of his father's notes in the
"History of Middle Earth" series. These are unpublished tales, alternative drafts, and background notes.
An incrediable amount of "what if" detail for the most ardent fans. Its been a while since I read
one of these, but I recall the material thinning out later in the series, as one leaves the main trilogy.
A flavor of these are in the appendix of the main LOTR volumes.
Three OS's from corporate-kings in their towers of glass;
Seven from valley-lords where orchards used to grow;
Nine from dot.coms doomed to die;
One from the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
One OS to rule them all! One OS to find them!
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
Back in the 1940s during the first secret bomb
tests some scientists were afraid an open air
nuke explosion would cause the oxygen and
notrogen in the air to burn into nitric acid.
And a chain reaction could burn all the air.
However very little of this happened.
It is thought the friction of large meteors
do a similar thing.
MITs Computer Science 101 (6.001) is based a the
LISP variant called SCHEME. About half of the
MIT students take this course required for all
computer science majors and electrical engineeers.
This course has used LISP for most of its 30 year
history except one term when it tried Java.
It is presumed the most MIT students have programmed
extensively in high school one of the more practical language like C or JAVA.
This purpose of this course is to teach fundamental
program constructs and not how to get a job.
Most computer companies did research and development
at the beginning, not after 15 years.
For most of its history MicroSoft just emulated
what others had already did, and sell it
"more effectively".
At least MS now has some respectable brainpower,
but I dont see much of it in their products yet.
A four of those companies started as grad student projects
(routers were a computer staff project).
Stanford pretty much ignored them when they started
companies. This is documented in Revenge of the
Nerds, series II. And I used the the prototypes
of the first three during my years at Stanford.
In fact, the name SUN originally stood for Stanford
University Network.
On the other hand for each of these mega-successes,
there are ten failures. Todays NY Times has a
story about a Stanford student dropping out to
start an unsuccessful dot.com, then returning
to finish the degree. He says that his frathouse
had eight dot.coms running on Stanford servers
during the peak- none of them succeeding.
Assume I want time-shift ALL my weekly viewing
from night to day or to weekends etc, I'd need
a maximum of 20-30 hours on the laziest weeks.
I have seven four-hour tapes now for this purpose,
and rarely time shift ten hours a week.
I suppose the other 300 hours could be for
archiving, but there isn't that much I'd want.
I'd guestimate 100 hours would satisfy all
but the hard core vegetables.
They quote the most agression compression rate
in these hour ratings. People who actually have
these systems prefer 1.5-2 GB per hour for higher
quality.
At about $200 for a 80 GB disk, thats about $800,
presuming the system ships with enough controller
capacity.
The ultimate goal is to derive all measures from
the fundamental constants of physics.
The two most popular are "c" the special of light
and "h" Planck's quantum of action.
A recent Physics today suggests a using
E=mc^2 and E=hv, where v is a frequency.
Frequencies are the most accurately measurable
item in the universe, at a current accuracy of
one part in 10^19. So the proposal is to choose
a "kilogram frequency" that precisely defines
the kilogram. There is already a "meter frequency"
that precisely defines the meter length in terms
of light velocity. And a "second frequency"
which some frequency count close to an astronomical
second.
The least well-known constant is the gravitational
constant, measured only to four decimal places.
The probably is instrumental error, because
everything pulls on everything else.
At least twice in the past decade someone has
proposed changing the law of gravitation because
of funny measurements, but every time an
experiment error was found. The constant "G"
doesn't fit into many physics equations,
so it isn't as easy to bootstrap equations
as for the other constants and measurement units.
Christianity (and its affiliate communism)
holds out for last minute redemption-
that as long as you are alive you can repent
and turn good.
IN the pagan myths the gods and humans have
intrinsic good or bad natures.
Ironic because J.R.s close colleague wrote
Christian mythology fantasy series.
J.R.'s son Christopher published at least 16
Tolkien books from his father's papers after
his death. These include the Silmarillion,
Numenor, Tales, Lost Tales, and the tweleve volume
"History of Middle Earth".
The latter contains rough drafts of the material
in LOTR.
The Silmarillion and the first couple history
books were interesting. However the later stuff
is more sketchy and bird cage lining.
In the USA people value making money more than being
education. Education is a means to money.
In many other cultural traditions- east Asian,
south Asian, Jewish, etc., education is
valued in its own right.
The major cause is the majority of the population
considers science difficult and mysterious.
Youngs are especially told this.
I was raised to percieve science as masculine and
exciting.
gloomy job and party scene
on
SIGGRAPH 2001
·
· Score: 2
There were 30 job ads and 1200 resumes.
In 1997 when movie animation reached its peak
frenzy
there were three jobs ads per resume.
Disney had laid off a quarter of its animators.
Big layoffs at DW/PDI.
No studios on the exhibit floor.
Gone are the days of the splashy studio parties
in the evening.
Today's NY Times has an
article on quantum memory.
This is not the same as quantum computing,
but does use a quantum state of atoms to make
propose extremely dense memory.
The A.I. effort is often classified into two camps.
One is to approach human intelligence. This usually
implies conversational ability, since a hallmark of
human intelligence is language. This A.I. approach is
called "hard A.I.".
Soft A.I. looks at sub-problems, such as problem
solving, image understanding and so on.
Many of software inovations originated in A.I.
labs (e.g. interactive editors, bitmap graphics).
(During the early 80s these spinoffs were sometimes
confused with A.I.)
A problem with both kinds of A.I. is that its a
receding target. Once an important goal has been
reached, e.g. a chess computer that beats grand masters,
people write it off as a nice trick,
but not really A.I.
So I proprose what I call "interesting A.I.".
Two hallmarks of human intelligence are language
and curiosity. So if an A.I. could TELL us
something new and interesting on a regular basis,
then I would call it a success.
I suspect A.I.s will first arise in entertainment
computing: either as a robo-toy, a synthetic game
player, or synthetic actor in a film. This will be
a results of people's drive for challenging
creative play.
Custom systems- whether completely novel, or a
scale up of a commercial system- always have
very high overheads.
First, you have a dedicated hardware and software
support crew. A production system ammortises
this over multiple deliveries.
Second, you are pushing the envelope. Though it
looks possible on paper, you don't always know
what won't scale up properly in a cutting edge
system.
Third, educational institutions (U of I) charge
large overheads (@50%) for existing buildings/staff.
The largest systems just don't get built
unless the government subsdizes some of the costs.
If you are lucky, the contracting company learns
new things to help its commercial side.
Slashdot Mirror
At the height of the dot.com, workers weren't exactly ticking to their jobs to help the company prosper,
except in the cases of golden handcuffs (long term stock options).
Now they expect these companies to all the sudden reward them with generous severances.
What good for the goose is good for the gander.
Most internet connected computers when hosed
in 1988 during the Morris worm. But it was
mostly just universities and few military.
After his father's death, Chris has published twelve annotated volumes of his father's notes in the
"History of Middle Earth" series. These are unpublished tales, alternative drafts, and background notes.
An incrediable amount of "what if" detail for the most ardent fans. Its been a while since I read
one of these, but I recall the material thinning out later in the series, as one leaves the main trilogy.
A flavor of these are in the appendix of the main LOTR volumes.
Three OS's from corporate-kings in their towers of glass;
Seven from valley-lords where orchards used to grow;
Nine from dot.coms doomed to die;
One from the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
One OS to rule them all! One OS to find them!
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
(Until the wizard of Finland frees them all.)
Back in the 1940s during the first secret bomb
tests some scientists were afraid an open air
nuke explosion would cause the oxygen and
notrogen in the air to burn into nitric acid.
And a chain reaction could burn all the air.
However very little of this happened.
It is thought the friction of large meteors
do a similar thing.
Their main use was to "materialize" the designs
of graphic artists. Also they were QC tools of
object-scanning machines.
MITs Computer Science 101 (6.001) is based a the
LISP variant called SCHEME. About half of the
MIT students take this course required for all
computer science majors and electrical engineeers.
This course has used LISP for most of its 30 year
history except one term when it tried Java.
It is presumed the most MIT students have programmed
extensively in high school one of the more practical language like C or JAVA.
This purpose of this course is to teach fundamental
program constructs and not how to get a job.
Ironically the super spy agency was one of the
few organizations to report a serious Y2K problem.
Most computer companies did research and development
at the beginning, not after 15 years.
For most of its history MicroSoft just emulated
what others had already did, and sell it
"more effectively".
At least MS now has some respectable brainpower,
but I dont see much of it in their products yet.
And it was like living inside slashdot 24/7.
(Actually a higher quality slashdot where
everyone knows what they are talking about instead
of the 20% here.)
A four of those companies started as grad student projects
(routers were a computer staff project).
Stanford pretty much ignored them when they started
companies. This is documented in Revenge of the
Nerds, series II. And I used the the prototypes
of the first three during my years at Stanford.
In fact, the name SUN originally stood for Stanford
University Network.
On the other hand for each of these mega-successes,
there are ten failures. Todays NY Times has a
story about a Stanford student dropping out to
start an unsuccessful dot.com, then returning
to finish the degree. He says that his frathouse
had eight dot.coms running on Stanford servers
during the peak- none of them succeeding.
Assume I want time-shift ALL my weekly viewing
from night to day or to weekends etc, I'd need
a maximum of 20-30 hours on the laziest weeks.
I have seven four-hour tapes now for this purpose,
and rarely time shift ten hours a week.
I suppose the other 300 hours could be for
archiving, but there isn't that much I'd want.
I'd guestimate 100 hours would satisfy all
but the hard core vegetables.
They quote the most agression compression rate
in these hour ratings. People who actually have
these systems prefer 1.5-2 GB per hour for higher
quality.
At about $200 for a 80 GB disk, thats about $800,
presuming the system ships with enough controller
capacity.
The ultimate goal is to derive all measures from
the fundamental constants of physics.
The two most popular are "c" the special of light
and "h" Planck's quantum of action.
A recent Physics today suggests a using
E=mc^2 and E=hv, where v is a frequency.
Frequencies are the most accurately measurable
item in the universe, at a current accuracy of
one part in 10^19. So the proposal is to choose
a "kilogram frequency" that precisely defines
the kilogram. There is already a "meter frequency"
that precisely defines the meter length in terms
of light velocity. And a "second frequency"
which some frequency count close to an astronomical
second.
The least well-known constant is the gravitational
constant, measured only to four decimal places.
The probably is instrumental error, because
everything pulls on everything else.
At least twice in the past decade someone has
proposed changing the law of gravitation because
of funny measurements, but every time an
experiment error was found. The constant "G"
doesn't fit into many physics equations,
so it isn't as easy to bootstrap equations
as for the other constants and measurement units.
Christianity (and its affiliate communism)
holds out for last minute redemption-
that as long as you are alive you can repent
and turn good.
IN the pagan myths the gods and humans have
intrinsic good or bad natures.
Ironic because J.R.s close colleague wrote
Christian mythology fantasy series.
J.R.'s son Christopher published at least 16
Tolkien books from his father's papers after
his death. These include the Silmarillion,
Numenor, Tales, Lost Tales, and the tweleve volume
"History of Middle Earth".
The latter contains rough drafts of the material
in LOTR.
The Silmarillion and the first couple history
books were interesting. However the later stuff
is more sketchy and bird cage lining.
In the USA people value making money more than being
education. Education is a means to money.
In many other cultural traditions- east Asian,
south Asian, Jewish, etc., education is
valued in its own right.
The major cause is the majority of the population
considers science difficult and mysterious.
Youngs are especially told this.
I was raised to percieve science as masculine and
exciting.
There were 30 job ads and 1200 resumes.
In 1997 when movie animation reached its peak
frenzy
there were three jobs ads per resume.
Disney had laid off a quarter of its animators.
Big layoffs at DW/PDI.
No studios on the exhibit floor.
Gone are the days of the splashy studio parties
in the evening.
34,000 this year versus 45,000 in 1999.
(Alternates between CA and somewhere east.
Have to compare CA years.)
Has a nice history of PGP.
Today's NY Times has an
article on quantum memory.
This is not the same as quantum computing,
but does use a quantum state of atoms to make
propose extremely dense memory.
The A.I. effort is often classified into two camps.
One is to approach human intelligence. This usually
implies conversational ability, since a hallmark of
human intelligence is language. This A.I. approach is
called "hard A.I.".
Soft A.I. looks at sub-problems, such as problem
solving, image understanding and so on.
Many of software inovations originated in A.I.
labs (e.g. interactive editors, bitmap graphics).
(During the early 80s these spinoffs were sometimes
confused with A.I.)
A problem with both kinds of A.I. is that its a
receding target. Once an important goal has been
reached, e.g. a chess computer that beats grand masters,
people write it off as a nice trick,
but not really A.I.
So I proprose what I call "interesting A.I.".
Two hallmarks of human intelligence are language
and curiosity. So if an A.I. could TELL us
something new and interesting on a regular basis,
then I would call it a success.
I suspect A.I.s will first arise in entertainment
computing: either as a robo-toy, a synthetic game
player, or synthetic actor in a film. This will be
a results of people's drive for challenging
creative play.
Bull gave a keynote speech at the AI meeting in
Seattle last week here .
MicroSoft has a big interest too.
Custom systems- whether completely novel, or a
scale up of a commercial system- always have
very high overheads.
First, you have a dedicated hardware and software
support crew. A production system ammortises
this over multiple deliveries.
Second, you are pushing the envelope. Though it
looks possible on paper, you don't always know
what won't scale up properly in a cutting edge
system.
Third, educational institutions (U of I) charge
large overheads (@50%) for existing buildings/staff.
The largest systems just don't get built
unless the government subsdizes some of the costs.
If you are lucky, the contracting company learns
new things to help its commercial side.