ALl MS has to do is wait for Bush to become president. The new attorney general will settle with MS as quickly as possible for the minimum Jackson's ruling allows.
The first 15 humans (the two genome projects) took about ten years to sequence to generate the genome, but with most of it happening the final year. Since sequencing is primarily an information based activity- with sequencer robots and supercomputers, its speed should double every couple years. Near instaneously sequencing is only a matter of time.
OK, it was officially the other way around. Apple gives about 20% of its valuation ($400M) to a company with no profits and having devoured nearly a $100M of investor's cash. NeXT personnel infiltrate major Apple posts, turn Apple around, replace (merge) MAC-OS with theirs.
I wouldn't put beyond Steve to do this with Disney/ABC, but why? Steve's a nerd at heart and wouldn't be interested in most of Disney business.
The DOJ confronted Intel about shady activities against DEC/Compaq and Intergraph last year. Unlike MicroSoft, Intel settled with a change of business practices, and I forget, money(?).
I find both a wisdom and sour grapes in Stoll's books. Both the computer and non-computer techniques have to be learned independent of each other. You can't truely function in the world without knowing both well.
First real GUI I could buy for home. Subsequent GUIs have evolutionary versus the jump from text to Mac. The Mac I got excited about, while modestly interested in successors.
Xerox Alto and Xerox Smalltalk from the mid-1970s had some nice features that never made it into their commercials successors such as the Lisa, Mac, Motif, NeXT or Windows. These ran on CPU speeds in hundreds of thousands operations per second or 3-4 magnitudes slower than now.
I attended it back in 1977. Back then Bill Gates and Steve Jobs manned their own booths. Hardware and software was very limited, people were more excited by it than now.
Assuming the ultimate user interface is interactive HDTV from any human being to a server or another human being. That would be about two megabits a second cleverly compressed. Intelligent TVs or immersive systems compute and display only what the eye is looking at the moment, simulating infinite TV screens. A given user would not need an independent TV in every room of a house or office, but bandwidth that followed him or her. So we are talking about 20 quadrillion independent bits per second of bandwidth for GUIs for the entire human race, if cleverly compressed. The highest multi-plexed optical cable carries about 5 terabits these days, or 1/4000th of the entire need capacity.
As phone companies know, you don't need all this bandwidth in all places all the time, because humans are spread out. Therefore they have telephone exchanges for wires, and cells for wireless. You might get my with a hundred thousand simultaneous interactive TV channels in the densest urban environment, allowing everyone to be using the interactive TV at once. We are basically talking about a million bits times a million channels, or something already within current optical communication capacities.
A current unknown is the multiplier effect of robotic servants. Every American currently has about a hundred embedded CPUs in appliances and vehicles currently serving them. Extrapolate this to vehicles that see for you, automated household appliances with vision, etc. I suspect these could increase bandwidth needs by a factor of 5-10, but not beyond that.
The original pentium was going to be called the 80586 until Intel had trouble trademarking their x86 numbering system. Then there was the P6 instead of the 80686 or Hexium/sexium (depending on how you wanted to bastardize mixed Greek/Latin). Then the P3 and P4.
Generally a line is good for about four generations before the marketing gets tired and changes naming.
The supercomputer industry is fading. Only the government is willing to shell out big bucks for top end machines. They only have a handful of applications that qualify- weather prediction, bomb simulation, airplane design.
Generally only government will buy computers that cost over $10 million, so the high-end configurations are rarely tested. The ASCI program buys one of these every few years for a national lab. The long-term goal is a petaflop in a decade or so.
I guess there were some bad experiences with companies like Thinking Machines that had promising designs, but became too dependent on the government trough and couldn't survive in the commercial world. Now it is the case of the "rich get richer". No one is going to chance $20 - $100 million on second-tier computer company you aren't sure will be around for the life of one computing generation, as short as they are these days.
Frederick Lenz (aka Rama) and the AUM group both incoporated computer consulting in their religious cults (there are probably other examples). Both went after smart, disillusioned young people who could easily start up such companies. And these enterprises could change location quickly when the leader need to flee.
Several object oriented C versions appeared in the mid-1980s. At the time many people preferred ObjectiveC because it looked more like SmallTalk. NeXT (now Apple) used it as the base language. However, college hackers preferred C++ because it was free (or almost free depending on your ATT UNIX license). That was one of the main reasons it became more popular.
I liked Sun Microsystems' wearable computer in the form of a ring. Compact and easy to wear. Originally for smart card and ID card applications, but no reason it cant be extended.
(That is after they identify the 50 some thousand genes which only are 1% of the bases.) The initial draft uses about 15 people- ten for the government and five for Celera, when completed in a year or two. Then they look for spots that differ systematically between people. The acronymn SNP stands for single spot differences, or about one base in a thousand. These SNP and the multiple cousins will define the range of being human and the range of genetic disease.
The newer sequence robots determine thousands of base pairs per day- much faster than before. However, there is a limit on maximum piece size.
Supercomputers determine the connections between pieces. The government approach is more cautious in regards to breaking the genome into pieces. consider the anology of breaking a skyscraper's windows into granular pebbles, each which can be automatically sequenced. The government gave each floor of the building to different lab. In turn each lab goes window by window, shard by shard at a time. Celera basically just pulverized the entire building at once and are reassembling the pebbles simultaneously. They compute quadrillions of comparisons of each pebble with each other to discover how they fit together. People thought this was crazy, but this worked on animals with as much as 10% of the human genome.
When they announced the fly, worm, yeast and human chromosome #22 and #21 genome, they were about to give a 99.9% accurate count of the genes and rough protein classification. Today's announcement doesn't do that.
Some interesting issues to resolve with the count: 1) The numbers are all over the board, between 35,000 to 150,000 genes. The low end was triggered by a low #21 count. In fact there is a contest to see who has the best prediction. 2) More is not necessarily "more evolved". From a count of genes and proteins, the worm is 25% more complicated than the fly. Where do humans fall into this range. 3) Its interesting to see how many genes humans shared with these other sequence organism. The majority of known genetic cancers have exact genetic analogs in these other organisms.
Slashdot Mirror
Special Olympics survived.
Gay Olympics lost the trademark suit.
ALl MS has to do is wait for Bush to become president. The new attorney general will settle with MS as quickly as possible for the minimum Jackson's ruling allows.
In the 1980s C was in ATT UNIX which was nearly
free and open source at universities.
You had to buy most versions of Pascal.
San Jose Mercury mentioned this was happening
in article last week.
(Submitted to slashdot / denied.)
We could use filters like in email or usenet.
Or sites could be rated by users like ebay or epinions.
The first 15 humans (the two genome projects) took about ten years to sequence to generate the genome, but with most of it happening the final year. Since sequencing is primarily an information based activity- with sequencer robots and supercomputers, its speed should double every couple years. Near instaneously sequencing is only a matter of time.
Year - Seconds to sequence a human
2000 16,000,000 (six months)
2002 8,000,000
2004 4,000,000
2006 2,000,000 (month)
2008 1,000,000
2010 500,000
2012 250,000
2014 125,000
2016 62,000 (day)
2018 31,000
2020 15,000
2022 8,000
2024 4,000 (hour)
2026 2,000
2028 1,000
2030 500
2032 250
2034 125
2036 62 (minute)
2038 31
2040 16
2042 8
2044 4
2046 2
2048 1 (second)
OK, it was officially the other way around. Apple gives about 20% of its valuation ($400M) to a company with no profits and having devoured nearly a $100M of investor's cash. NeXT personnel infiltrate major Apple posts, turn Apple around, replace (merge) MAC-OS with theirs.
I wouldn't put beyond Steve to do this with Disney/ABC, but why? Steve's a nerd at heart and wouldn't be interested in most of Disney business.
The DOJ confronted Intel about shady activities against DEC/Compaq and Intergraph last year. Unlike MicroSoft, Intel settled with a change of business practices, and I forget, money(?).
I find both a wisdom and sour grapes in Stoll's books. Both the computer and non-computer techniques have to be learned independent of each other. You can't truely function in the world without knowing both well.
First real GUI I could buy for home. Subsequent GUIs have evolutionary versus the jump from text to Mac. The Mac I got excited about, while modestly interested in successors.
Xerox Alto and Xerox Smalltalk from the mid-1970s
had some nice features that never made it into their commercials successors such as the Lisa, Mac, Motif, NeXT or Windows. These ran on CPU speeds in hundreds of thousands operations per second or 3-4 magnitudes slower than now.
That one scared as a kid- but I forget whether it
was the rats or cheesy music.
I attended it back in 1977. Back then Bill Gates and Steve Jobs manned their own booths. Hardware and software was very limited, people were more excited by it than now.
Assuming the ultimate user interface is interactive HDTV from any human being to a server
or another human being. That would be about two megabits a second cleverly compressed. Intelligent TVs or immersive systems compute and display only what the eye is looking at the moment, simulating infinite TV screens. A given user would not need an independent TV in every room of a house or office, but bandwidth that followed him or her. So we are talking about 20 quadrillion independent bits per second of bandwidth for GUIs for the entire human race, if cleverly compressed. The highest multi-plexed optical cable carries about 5 terabits these days, or 1/4000th of the entire need capacity.
As phone companies know, you don't need all this bandwidth in all places all the time, because humans are spread out. Therefore they have telephone exchanges for wires, and cells for wireless. You might get my with a hundred thousand simultaneous interactive TV channels in the densest urban environment, allowing everyone to be using the interactive TV at once. We are basically talking about a million bits times a million channels, or something already within current optical communication capacities.
A current unknown is the multiplier effect of robotic servants. Every American currently has about a hundred embedded CPUs in appliances and vehicles currently serving them. Extrapolate this to vehicles that see for you, automated household appliances with vision, etc. I suspect these could increase bandwidth needs by a factor of 5-10, but not beyond that.
There had been rumors in the past few years that the Chinese were planning to launch a man into about in the year 2000, mainly for national pride.
The original pentium was going to be called the 80586 until Intel had trouble trademarking their x86 numbering system. Then there was the P6 instead of the 80686 or Hexium/sexium (depending on how you wanted to bastardize mixed Greek/Latin). Then the P3 and P4.
Generally a line is good for about four generations before the marketing gets tired and changes naming.
The supercomputer industry is fading. Only the government is willing to shell out big bucks for top end machines. They only have a handful of applications that qualify- weather prediction, bomb simulation, airplane design.
Generally only government will buy computers that cost over $10 million, so the high-end configurations are rarely tested. The ASCI program buys one of these every few years for a national lab. The long-term goal is a petaflop in a decade or so.
I guess there were some bad experiences with companies like Thinking Machines that had promising designs, but became too dependent on the government trough and couldn't survive in the commercial world. Now it is the case of the "rich get richer". No one is going to chance $20 - $100 million on second-tier computer company you aren't sure will be around for the life of one computing generation, as short as they are these days.
And learn to get your own food, do your laundry,
find a companion, and be about 80%-100% responsible for yourself.
Frederick Lenz (aka Rama) and the AUM group both
incoporated computer consulting in their religious cults (there are probably other examples). Both went after smart, disillusioned young people who could easily start up such companies. And these enterprises could change location quickly when the leader need to flee.
Several object oriented C versions appeared in the mid-1980s. At the time many people preferred ObjectiveC because it looked more like SmallTalk. NeXT (now Apple) used it as the base language. However, college hackers preferred C++ because it was free (or almost free depending on your ATT UNIX license). That was one of the main reasons it became more popular.
I liked Sun Microsystems' wearable computer in the form of a ring. Compact and easy to wear. Originally for smart card and ID card applications, but no reason it cant be extended.
When do they sequence her DNA so all the lonely slashdotters will have clones? :-)
(That is after they identify the 50 some thousand genes which only are 1% of the bases.)
The initial draft uses about 15 people- ten for the government and five for Celera, when completed in a year or two.
Then they look for spots that differ systematically between people. The acronymn SNP stands for single spot differences, or about one base in a thousand. These SNP and the multiple cousins will define the range of being human and the range of genetic disease.
The newer sequence robots determine thousands of
base pairs per day- much faster than before.
However, there is a limit on maximum piece size.
Supercomputers determine the connections between pieces. The government approach is more cautious in regards to breaking the genome into pieces. consider the anology of breaking a skyscraper's windows into granular pebbles, each which can be automatically sequenced. The government gave each floor of the building to different lab. In turn each lab goes window by window, shard by shard at a time. Celera basically just pulverized the entire building at once and are reassembling the pebbles simultaneously. They compute quadrillions of comparisons of each pebble with each other to discover how they fit together. People thought this was crazy, but this worked on animals with as much as 10% of the human genome.
When they announced the fly, worm, yeast
and human chromosome #22 and #21 genome,
they were about to give a 99.9% accurate count
of the genes and rough protein classification.
Today's announcement doesn't do that.
Some interesting issues to resolve with the count:
1) The numbers are all over the board, between 35,000 to 150,000 genes. The low end was triggered by a low #21 count. In fact there is a contest to see who has the best prediction.
2) More is not necessarily "more evolved". From a count of genes and proteins, the worm is 25% more complicated than the fly. Where do humans fall into this range.
3) Its interesting to see how many genes humans shared with these other sequence organism. The majority of known genetic cancers have exact genetic analogs in these other organisms.