Is anyone else concerned they named a life support and docking module after the word for Star? I mean, they're great things, but I wouldn't want to live inside one. Do they know something we don't about it's likelihood of erupting in nuclear fusion driven flame ?...
Actually though the first few chapters were good the last half of the book seemed a bit stretched and arbitrary. Maybe that's just a case of the API being so simple. I would have been happier with a single, much more sophisticated example than the series of lightweight ones that were given.
I guess it just plays to my worries about the scalability of the current implementations of JavaSpaces. Does anyone know of any enterprise-class applications of JavaSpaces or tuple spaces in general.
Quarantine is the first of his "subjective cosmology" set and deals very well with issues of fate and probability. "Luminous", his latest collection of short stories, is very good too. When I first read Axiomatic it simply blew me away.
To paraphrase something from I think Neverness: our level of genetic sophistication is we've just learned the alphabet. We've pretty much just written down all the letters so far and we can recognise some of them in words. It will be a long time until we understand DNA grammar.
Re:s/human genome project/nuclear energy/g
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
2. The problems are not technical ("We're fucked if this power station melts down") but social ("We don't the ability to do this because we will abuse it").
Biological systems are particularly prone to this because the good of an individual in the short term are not the same as the good of the society in the medium-long term - ie - a greedy algorithm doesn't work.
Most/. readers would be aware that more and more powerful antibiotics are required because of overuse throughout the community. People demand antibiotics because they feel sick (even though it's a virus and this treatment will be symptomatic and unnecessary). Doctors provide antibiotics because they don't want to seem useless (ditto). [Gratuitous US-bashing: in the US there are no regulations about when antibiotic effected farm produce can be shipped. A cow can be given antibiotics which will effect humans, slaughtered, and eaten all on the same day.]
Not even active stupidity is necessary. In Australia recently immunization rates for common childhood diseases dropped to appalling levels (of the top of my head it could have been as low as 60%) simply because people forgot to get their children immunized. In this case more goverment regulation was introduced at primary school to make it just as inconvenient to avoid immunization getting it. Most people, having no moral issues with immunization, choose to get their kids protected, which helps not just them but the herd immunity.
One of the key hedges in the human race against risk is a diverse genome, so that changes in the environment can be adapted to by natural selection. My point is that individual self interest would make it worthwhile to restrict the genome by pursuing seeemingly desirable traits for their children, putting the species at risk of being a monoculture. And I have no idea how to avoid it without massive beureucratic regulation, which seems inelegant at the least.
Nah, I hear the cheese is fairly low quality and that initial ventures there, while quirky and offbeat, eventually lead to encounters with impolite cyberdogs.
It's "_u_owhoaahz", where the _u_ is pronounced but not emphasised, and the z is soft. It's a once common, now increasingly defunct, Czech-Hawaiin term.
I would actually say much the same thing of the ending to American Beauty. the "Gee, I'm almost happy that that macho coward blew my brains out" monologue almost made me sick. I would have been much happier with something like: [snip]
I don't know, that seems a little banal to me. One of the appealing elements about American Beauty was its grand tragedy feel in a suburban setting. The only reason AB was a tragedy was because Lester Burnam was redeemed before he died; otherwise the ending would just have been - middle age lech gets blown away in comic confusion. It's a touch less poetic. Ho hum.
Turing thought of the Universal Turing Machine, the theoretical computer. But he was also involved with the creation of the first modern computer. Sounds pretty paternal to me.
Wouldn't Babbage be the practical grandfather of computing? With Goedel as the other grandfather.
It is really irritating when people think they need to emphasise text to make it understood. Easy formatting is great but it makes people lazy writers.
Bold text does not automatically make a website usable. I found that the text was less readable because it mixed headline style formatting and normal text in the same sentence.
Actually I've heard Free Cell was a critical test app for the original versions Windows NT. I wonder if the OS company can use testing as an excuse to grab more applications?
Yes, a DDOS attach using these beasties would be rather nasty. Particularly if the first thing the virus did was connect to a website with a variety of realistic sound bites on it. And it would be even nastier if you got hold of an internal phone directory...
Scary..
Re:Dated Science Fiction
on
Orbitsville
·
· Score: 1
Gibson has a particularly keen eye for this effect, as shown by "The Gernsback Continuum", a wonderful short story where a 1980s photo-journalist starts seeing visions of the future from the 1920s. The whole story is written with a disturbing under-the-skin irreverance. Every time I see once cutting edge technology go obsolete I think of this story.
Their JDK kicks Sun's cleanly and soundly, not that Sun's is a bad one, but IBM's just seems to have more going for it.
To be fair, Sun generally produces reference implementations for their JDKs where speed and accuracy of development, not performance, is the key factor. The exception to this is Solaris where at one point JDK on Solaris was the most scalable around in terms of threads (IIRC).
Honestly, having/. posters in other timezones would only be for the good. Slashdot is a creature of the Internet; it could take advantage of the different timezones and make a bug into a feature:).
Without privacy laws on the books, we are headed for a future similar to Kafka's Trial: companies make decisions about you based on information about you that is essentially secret.
Whoah there, I don't remember that from when I read Kafka! Unless were talking about another wacky Czech existentialist who wrote a book called The Trial . In fact, I thought one of the points was they could have misidentified him entirely; his failures were on a moral level it was absurd to judge with any formal apparatus.
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for one morning he woke to find someone had sold all of his furniture on Ebay.
Do I *really* need to leap up and learn "Yet Another Markup Language?" (side note...can I patent/copyright/trademark "yet another..."?)
Well, it isn't completely new, it's a dialect of XML.
My prediction is that we are going to Moore's Law WAP to death in short order ("I'd like 'The Patently Obvious' for $400, Alex")
The limiting factors for WAP devices by and large aren't processor power, so Moore's law doesn't apply. The two major factors are screen size and network speed.
The only guideline I know for network speed is Neilsen's Law, which is significantly slower than Moore's, and that only covers Internet bandwidth, not Wireless bandwidth. And screen size is fixed. If you don't think that calls for a different UI, try posting to/. off a cell phone.
I think you'll find the interruptions went both ways; it was more because of the bareknuckle nature of the discussion than rudeness on either part. Dickinson has some alien views and he certainly came out swinging, but it was pretty aggressive on both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume, then, that it isn't exclusively for South Americans if General Suharto, former president of Indonesia, was trained there.
Is anyone else concerned they named a life support and docking module after the word for Star? I mean, they're great things, but I wouldn't want to live inside one. Do they know something we don't about it's likelihood of erupting in nuclear fusion driven flame ? ...
I guess it just plays to my worries about the scalability of the current implementations of JavaSpaces. Does anyone know of any enterprise-class applications of JavaSpaces or tuple spaces in general.
Hey ... grammar nazi seems to be on a break
Aah, Silicon Gully.
Quarantine is the first of his "subjective cosmology" set and deals very well with issues of fate and probability. "Luminous", his latest collection of short stories, is very good too. When I first read Axiomatic it simply blew me away.
Isn't this the sort of discussion that ends with Man proving that Black = White and proceeding to get himself killed at the next zebra crossing?
To paraphrase something from I think Neverness: our level of genetic sophistication is we've just learned the alphabet. We've pretty much just written down all the letters so far and we can recognise some of them in words. It will be a long time until we understand DNA grammar.
Biological systems are particularly prone to this because the good of an individual in the short term are not the same as the good of the society in the medium-long term - ie - a greedy algorithm doesn't work.
Most /. readers would be aware that more and more powerful antibiotics are required because of overuse throughout the community. People demand antibiotics because they feel sick (even though it's a virus and this treatment will be symptomatic and unnecessary). Doctors provide antibiotics because they don't want to seem useless (ditto). [Gratuitous US-bashing: in the US there are no regulations about when antibiotic effected farm produce can be shipped. A cow can be given antibiotics which will effect humans, slaughtered, and eaten all on the same day.]
Not even active stupidity is necessary. In Australia recently immunization rates for common childhood diseases dropped to appalling levels (of the top of my head it could have been as low as 60%) simply because people forgot to get their children immunized. In this case more goverment regulation was introduced at primary school to make it just as inconvenient to avoid immunization getting it. Most people, having no moral issues with immunization, choose to get their kids protected, which helps not just them but the herd immunity.
One of the key hedges in the human race against risk is a diverse genome, so that changes in the environment can be adapted to by natural selection. My point is that individual self interest would make it worthwhile to restrict the genome by pursuing seeemingly desirable traits for their children, putting the species at risk of being a monoculture. And I have no idea how to avoid it without massive beureucratic regulation, which seems inelegant at the least.
Didn't Frankenstein's monster wander off into the Artic? That would be easier to get to from Germany.
I think Australia is supplying beer. 1 carton.
Nah, I hear the cheese is fairly low quality and that initial ventures there, while quirky and offbeat, eventually lead to encounters with impolite cyberdogs.
It's "_u_owhoaahz", where the _u_ is pronounced but not emphasised, and the z is soft. It's a once common, now increasingly defunct, Czech-Hawaiin term.
I don't know, that seems a little banal to me. One of the appealing elements about American Beauty was its grand tragedy feel in a suburban setting. The only reason AB was a tragedy was because Lester Burnam was redeemed before he died; otherwise the ending would just have been - middle age lech gets blown away in comic confusion. It's a touch less poetic. Ho hum.
Wouldn't Babbage be the practical grandfather of computing? With Goedel as the other grandfather.
Bold text does not automatically make a website usable. I found that the text was less readable because it mixed headline style formatting and normal text in the same sentence.
Actually I've heard Free Cell was a critical test app for the original versions Windows NT. I wonder if the OS company can use testing as an excuse to grab more applications?
Scary ..
Gibson has a particularly keen eye for this effect, as shown by "The Gernsback Continuum", a wonderful short story where a 1980s photo-journalist starts seeing visions of the future from the 1920s. The whole story is written with a disturbing under-the-skin irreverance. Every time I see once cutting edge technology go obsolete I think of this story.
To be fair, Sun generally produces reference implementations for their JDKs where speed and accuracy of development, not performance, is the key factor. The exception to this is Solaris where at one point JDK on Solaris was the most scalable around in terms of threads (IIRC).
But yeah, IBM's Java stuff is great.
Ahem.
Honestly, having /. posters in other timezones would only be for the good. Slashdot is a creature of the Internet; it could take advantage of the different timezones and make a bug into a feature :).
Whoah there, I don't remember that from when I read Kafka! Unless were talking about another wacky Czech existentialist who wrote a book called The Trial . In fact, I thought one of the points was they could have misidentified him entirely; his failures were on a moral level it was absurd to judge with any formal apparatus.
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for one morning he woke to find someone had sold all of his furniture on Ebay.
OTOH, it does have a familiar ring to it.
Mmm ... rollable screen. Can't wait to be playing Quake on someone's t-shirt in 5 years time.
Well, it isn't completely new, it's a dialect of XML.
My prediction is that we are going to Moore's Law WAP to death in short order ("I'd like 'The Patently Obvious' for $400, Alex")
The limiting factors for WAP devices by and large aren't processor power, so Moore's law doesn't apply. The two major factors are screen size and network speed.
The only guideline I know for network speed is Neilsen's Law, which is significantly slower than Moore's, and that only covers Internet bandwidth, not Wireless bandwidth. And screen size is fixed. If you don't think that calls for a different UI, try posting to /. off a cell phone.
I think you'll find the interruptions went both ways; it was more because of the bareknuckle nature of the discussion than rudeness on either part. Dickinson has some alien views and he certainly came out swinging, but it was pretty aggressive on both sides.