That's because those frameworks and libraries are millions of lines of code and features you no longer have to write.
Imagine writing your own xml parsers, configuration file handlers, log handlers, high performance ACID databases, web servers, networking libraries, GUI libraries, "OpenGL", etc. Or even operating systems. Even if Scheme is ten times more concise, it'll take a lot of time to write it all yourself.
If learning to use the libraries/frameworks would take longer than to do what you want from scratch, don't use them. But if they are well documented (as good libraries are), then learning to use them would take a lot less time than writing the equivalent functionality from scratch. If you not going to need that functionality then you don't need to learn it - it's not part of the language.
And how many nuances does Scheme have? I thought the main point of stuff like Scheme is it's a simple language. Not like perl or C++. So even with Scheme you're going to be spending a lot more time learning the frameworks and libraries that you can use with Scheme than learning Scheme itself. Unless you're really trying to write most things from scratch. Or writing "Hello World".
You can in theory build a perfect house atom by atom. I prefer to use as much prefab as possible.
If I'm going to write a desktop app I don't want to have to rewrite something like Tk or Qt or OpenGL. Nor figure out how to write interfaces/wrappers to each of them from scratch.
As people with eidetic memories know it can be hard to interact with people if you remember every little mistake they ever made, every thing they ever said on every subject and in particular about you.
Then this artificial eidetic memory is better since you can choose to erase the bits you want and they won't come back (without data recovery techniques).
It's up to the people using the tool. If you choose to forgive AND forget, delete all the related (tagged?) memories.
Whereas if you want to keep score you can mark the relevant items. Then you can have some statistics over time;). Then do some incident comparisons to see whether you are actually getting more/less sensitive, or the person is actually getting worse/better.
Think human augmentation not mere augmented reality.
Once you have a wearable computer+sensors+comms that are sufficiently advanced you can have them do the following: 0) Virtual telepathy+telekinesis 1) Continuous video+audio recording in high res of past X minutes, and low res for longer periods. This way you don't have to miss stuff - you can tell the computer to switch to high res till further notice (the past X minutes would already be in high res) and then save it. Eidetic memory for the masses! 2) Continuous background image recognition (look for faces or objects) 3) Continuous background audio recognition (voice, music ). 4) GPS+ map + compass direction feedback. 5) Work with "area/location computers" (so that you can more easily control/access location specific stuff - lights, jukebox, climate control, menus, ordering systems). 6) Many more stuff (super PDA features e.g. context sensitive reminders/prompts time+location+history+surroundings+etc ) - see below too.
If brain computer interfaces become safe, reliable and good, you could use stuff like "thought macros". For example a fancy computer program would let me link certain thought patterns with certain actions or objects.
That way I can do: [start command][recall object]{some thought pattern}[go][end]. And then the computer recalls the relevant object which could be a video, photo, sound, file or whatever.
I can also do [start command][recall previous][go][send to]{thought pattern of friend}[go][end]. Or get the computer to help calculate stuff, search databases. Or even do "rain man" counting (you could get the computer to highlight/mark the objects it is counting so that you can countercheck that it is counting correctly - humans are OK at detecting if something should be highlighted by the computer and isn't - counting large numbers of stuff fast isn't our forte ).
Thought patterns in square brackets are commands. Though patterns in curly brackets are various thought patterns you choose to associate with a person or item.
Put it all together you'd have humans with eidetic memory, telepathy, telekinesis, and other super/magical powers. The technology is already mostly there - we've already got some sort of telepathy with mobile phones etc. Heck in the 1990s I was hoping wearable computing would take off and we'd already have this "magic" by now.
The main hindrance to progress I see would be copyright and patent law. You'd be crippled by DRM and you wouldn't be able to walk into a cinema without all that stuff being forced off.
Ideas are easy. Implementation is the hard part. That's why patents suck in general;). Go ahead implement this. All these patent trolls, suits and lawsuits are slowing down progress. Someone smart can probably work out the details and improve on the idea - I hope someone does soon - I'm getting old and tired waiting for the future to arrive...
p.s. Military edition might have gun muzzle detection, military object identification (with data), camouflage countermeasures, automatic "crack-thump" sniper location, UWB radar+comms, range gated vision (the latter two can give away your position to enemies that are suitably equipped[1]).
[1] That said, electronic devices emit signals that can be detected if you have enough fancy stuff.
Once you get used to it, Scheme (or any other modern Lisp) is a very easy language to write clean, effective code in.
Scheme is great but the problem is I'm a crap programmer. So a language that helps with the code I write is not as important as a language that helps because of all the code that I DON'T have to write.
Basically I prefer to pick a language where there are already tons of existing good libraries/modules/code I can _easily_ use to do what I want. Stuff written by better programmers than me. That way the effective quality of my program goes up - since much of the functionality/code is actually written by someone else.
The other great thing is I don't normally have to support, document and fix that 3rd party code that I didn't write.;)
Languages like scheme are great if most of the stuff you need to get done is stuff that is unlike anything else someone else has written. But for most of us that's not true.
The an earlier phase was when the more violent Vikings (aka Scandinavians) got on their longships and colonized Britain and other places, leaving behind their more cooperative and pacifistic kin.
And that's why today the Scandinavians are relatively more peaceful while the Brits are famous for their football hooligans roaming Europe to get drunk and fight.
These seem more likely to reduce the amount of stuff stolen than some cameras and alarms. So maybe the insurance company would reduce your premiums if you had such a system installed.
There may be zero scarcity of smurf berries and farmville farms, but despite GM etc there will be an upper bound of wheat and other food that you can produce on this planet. You might be able to survive on food produced via nuclear energy, but given that there are already significant health differences resulting from merely different diets, it's going to take quite a while before they develop cost effective artificial foods that humans like and can thrive on.
The upper limit = 174 petawatts of sunlight hitting the earth. Subtract the energy for climate and other species, it's still plenty. But there will always be scarcity if we grow exponentially in numbers and wants.
We could go to space, but nobody is working on building real sustainable space stations with artificial gravity.
Just think of the Chinese, Vietnamese workers, etc as advanced robots. How's it working for the US workers so far? Are they having better and better lifestyles?
Perhaps eventually what you say would be true. But I bet it'll take significant time for that to happen.
And how much time and suffering that involves would depend on the path we choose.
I suspect the majority of us Slashdotters might not be the "move fast and run" types;).
FWIW, I won't fit in at EMC. I work slow- I prefer low bug rate to high feature created rate. I seem to keep inheriting things which were built with the opposite philosophy though. My boss asked me recently how I find bugs, whether I get them from the bug reporting system etc. I told him that they are everywhere, I just have to look at the code, or try adding a new feature and there they are...
There's some merit to the build crap fast approach though. You actually have something out the door much faster.
Yeah, one of the bosses at my workplace has had his car run out of fuel more than once in the past few months. Just too busy and optimistic about his car's range I guess.
Charge the Tesla like you'd recharge a power hungry smartphone.
Maybe some day we'd have hydrocarbon or alcohol fuel cell cars...
We're not far from virtual telepathy and telekinesis either. We're already communicating "like magic" with phones, and even buying stuff from vending machines with our phones. Some people are already going shopping, posting pics of something and asking their friends whether they should buy it. So just a few changes to the user interface, add some infra, standards and we'd be there.
Then we could pick different "Planes"/ "Augmented Reality Modes" depending on what we are trying to do in a particular area, and whether we have sufficient privileges. e.g. shopping, building maintenance, mall security.
Worth the money- more stable than the earlier ones. It's not that fragile BUT it will still break if you crash it too hard. The plastic ones are lighter and may perform better than the metal ones.
What I suggest you do is get your son started on one of those cheap mini remote control _cars_ first e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOp8We420Lc Once he can master 2D, then only let him try 3D. Otherwise it'll just be frustrating for both you and him.
The issue is learning how to control something from the perspective of that something rather than yourself. Or even just mastering basic hand eye coordination. Not everyone is a natural at these things.
And after that, be prepared to buy more than one heli;). They don't last that long anyway - the li-po battery doesn't last much more than 1 year. But they're cheap and they are a fair bit of fun for the money.
The specs are so amazing I do wonder if they are true. All that and only 16g. Not easy to even get a high quality video camera+transmitter that weighs much less than 16g.
Of course for some perspective, you can compare the specs with a dragonfly or hummingbird to see there's still much progress to be made in some areas;)
Show me a 16g heli with 30 minute flight time, stable in high winds, camera that _transmits_ live video (think battery life again), and can follow GPS coordinates (think yet more battery life).
Provide a link to one that's less than $1000. Otherwise you can figure out where all the millions went.
I've seen interesting civilian/toy helis: e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3WBUVYZkODI
But none have specs anything as impressive as _claimed_ in the article. It does make me wonder whether the claims are all true. If it's true it's pretty impressive tech. In fact it actually is not far from some of those Sci-Fi stuff.
I've got toy helis, and without all those specs, they are toys. 8 minute flight time requires pilot intervention in high winds. no GPS adding live hi-res video = even shorter flight time. Not water proof (my guess is the drone is waterproof or it'll be a major oops;) ).
As you can see the bugs aren't fringe stuff that only 0.1% of the people will encounter.
Maybe those OOo bugs are all fixed now, but we were talking about the past and why it was hard to make money from the product. My claim remains that the product was too crap to make substantial money from. How much would you pay for such crap? I wouldn't pay anything at all.
My exISP used to advertise/sell bandwidth based on the ADSL bandwidth.
The problem was my IP packets go over PPPoE which then goes over ATM and then over ADSL. ATM uses 53 byte cells with 5 byte overhead. That's about 10% in overheads (esp if you include everything else).
It was hard to make money from OpenOffice back then not because it was competing against a monopoly.
It's because for a very long time Star Office/OpenOffice/etc was crap. It was really crap, and I'm not talking about poor compatibility with MSO, just using its own document formats you still had crappy formatting bugs. Plenty of other terrible bugs- step by step search and replace within selection was broken (it would replace the entire selection!). MSO has/had it share of bugs but they are/were mostly not as bad as that.
It was so crap that I was telling people to use Kingsoft Office as an MSO alternative instead of OOo.
Slashdot Mirror
What you need is a phone app to tell you what colour stuff is.
There are many...
That's because those frameworks and libraries are millions of lines of code and features you no longer have to write.
Imagine writing your own xml parsers, configuration file handlers, log handlers, high performance ACID databases, web servers, networking libraries, GUI libraries, "OpenGL", etc. Or even operating systems. Even if Scheme is ten times more concise, it'll take a lot of time to write it all yourself.
If learning to use the libraries/frameworks would take longer than to do what you want from scratch, don't use them. But if they are well documented (as good libraries are), then learning to use them would take a lot less time than writing the equivalent functionality from scratch. If you not going to need that functionality then you don't need to learn it - it's not part of the language.
And how many nuances does Scheme have? I thought the main point of stuff like Scheme is it's a simple language. Not like perl or C++. So even with Scheme you're going to be spending a lot more time learning the frameworks and libraries that you can use with Scheme than learning Scheme itself. Unless you're really trying to write most things from scratch. Or writing "Hello World".
You can in theory build a perfect house atom by atom. I prefer to use as much prefab as possible.
If I'm going to write a desktop app I don't want to have to rewrite something like Tk or Qt or OpenGL. Nor figure out how to write interfaces/wrappers to each of them from scratch.
As people with eidetic memories know it can be hard to interact with people if you remember every little mistake they ever made, every thing they ever said on every subject and in particular about you.
Then this artificial eidetic memory is better since you can choose to erase the bits you want and they won't come back (without data recovery techniques).
It's up to the people using the tool. If you choose to forgive AND forget, delete all the related (tagged?) memories.
Whereas if you want to keep score you can mark the relevant items. Then you can have some statistics over time ;). Then do some incident comparisons to see whether you are actually getting more/less sensitive, or the person is actually getting worse/better.
Think human augmentation not mere augmented reality.
Once you have a wearable computer+sensors+comms that are sufficiently advanced you can have them do the following:
0) Virtual telepathy+telekinesis
1) Continuous video+audio recording in high res of past X minutes, and low res for longer periods. This way you don't have to miss stuff - you can tell the computer to switch to high res till further notice (the past X minutes would already be in high res) and then save it. Eidetic memory for the masses!
2) Continuous background image recognition (look for faces or objects)
3) Continuous background audio recognition (voice, music ).
4) GPS+ map + compass direction feedback.
5) Work with "area/location computers" (so that you can more easily control/access location specific stuff - lights, jukebox, climate control, menus, ordering systems).
6) Many more stuff (super PDA features e.g. context sensitive reminders/prompts time+location+history+surroundings+etc ) - see below too.
If brain computer interfaces become safe, reliable and good, you could use stuff like "thought macros". For example a fancy computer program would let me link certain thought patterns with certain actions or objects.
That way I can do: [start command][recall object]{some thought pattern}[go][end]. And then the computer recalls the relevant object which could be a video, photo, sound, file or whatever.
I can also do [start command][recall previous][go][send to]{thought pattern of friend}[go][end]. Or get the computer to help calculate stuff, search databases. Or even do "rain man" counting (you could get the computer to highlight/mark the objects it is counting so that you can countercheck that it is counting correctly - humans are OK at detecting if something should be highlighted by the computer and isn't - counting large numbers of stuff fast isn't our forte ).
Thought patterns in square brackets are commands. Though patterns in curly brackets are various thought patterns you choose to associate with a person or item.
Put it all together you'd have humans with eidetic memory, telepathy, telekinesis, and other super/magical powers. The technology is already mostly there - we've already got some sort of telepathy with mobile phones etc. Heck in the 1990s I was hoping wearable computing would take off and we'd already have this "magic" by now.
The main hindrance to progress I see would be copyright and patent law. You'd be crippled by DRM and you wouldn't be able to walk into a cinema without all that stuff being forced off.
Ideas are easy. Implementation is the hard part. That's why patents suck in general ;). Go ahead implement this. All these patent trolls, suits and lawsuits are slowing down progress. Someone smart can probably work out the details and improve on the idea - I hope someone does soon - I'm getting old and tired waiting for the future to arrive...
p.s. Military edition might have gun muzzle detection, military object identification (with data), camouflage countermeasures, automatic "crack-thump" sniper location, UWB radar+comms, range gated vision (the latter two can give away your position to enemies that are suitably equipped[1]).
[1] That said, electronic devices emit signals that can be detected if you have enough fancy stuff.
Once you get used to it, Scheme (or any other modern Lisp) is a very easy language to write clean, effective code in.
Scheme is great but the problem is I'm a crap programmer. So a language that helps with the code I write is not as important as a language that helps because of all the code that I DON'T have to write.
Basically I prefer to pick a language where there are already tons of existing good libraries/modules/code I can _easily_ use to do what I want. Stuff written by better programmers than me. That way the effective quality of my program goes up - since much of the functionality/code is actually written by someone else.
The other great thing is I don't normally have to support, document and fix that 3rd party code that I didn't write. ;)
Languages like scheme are great if most of the stuff you need to get done is stuff that is unlike anything else someone else has written. But for most of us that's not true.
The an earlier phase was when the more violent Vikings (aka Scandinavians) got on their longships and colonized Britain and other places, leaving behind their more cooperative and pacifistic kin.
:).
And that's why today the Scandinavians are relatively more peaceful while the Brits are famous for their football hooligans roaming Europe to get drunk and fight.
I can make up theories too
It's not just flowers the bees might feed on:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/pictures/121011-blue-honey-honeybees-animals-science/ :)
With police like that I doubt pictures of the crooks will help. Especially if they are masked or wearing helmets.
I wonder how much those anti-theft fog/smoke things cost and cost per release: ;) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAPw_xbTJzk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK083niNAmY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOgKti335tQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOqECorcOno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SZeCbARjKM
There's even a disco light edition
These seem more likely to reduce the amount of stuff stolen than some cameras and alarms. So maybe the insurance company would reduce your premiums if you had such a system installed.
Elegant? What do you want? Lightsabers?
If a loud alarm isn't enough add some smoke (as long as it doesn't trigger sprinklers or similar ;) ).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOgKti335tQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFWe-sAsAIA
You see with your brain too. If someone draws a simple picture on your palm or back, you can still "see" it in your mind.
See also: http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jun/feattongue
The brain is able to learn to see whether the picture is generated by touch or sound.
And even with sound there are different ways for seeing,
echolocation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA
and some software that converts images to pitch and left-right volume: http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm
Maybe what they could try is implant a sensory array to baby/young rats and see if they can add a extra video input to rats.
There may be zero scarcity of smurf berries and farmville farms, but despite GM etc there will be an upper bound of wheat and other food that you can produce on this planet. You might be able to survive on food produced via nuclear energy, but given that there are already significant health differences resulting from merely different diets, it's going to take quite a while before they develop cost effective artificial foods that humans like and can thrive on.
The upper limit = 174 petawatts of sunlight hitting the earth. Subtract the energy for climate and other species, it's still plenty. But there will always be scarcity if we grow exponentially in numbers and wants.
We could go to space, but nobody is working on building real sustainable space stations with artificial gravity.
Just think of the Chinese, Vietnamese workers, etc as advanced robots. How's it working for the US workers so far? Are they having better and better lifestyles?
Perhaps eventually what you say would be true. But I bet it'll take significant time for that to happen.
And how much time and suffering that involves would depend on the path we choose.
Too often if Google doesn't know the answer, more than 90% of the doctors won't know either.
But I am an asshole... Not a top class one though.
And I wouldn't want to work in a corporation full of assholes.
I suspect the majority of us Slashdotters might not be the "move fast and run" types ;).
FWIW, I won't fit in at EMC. I work slow- I prefer low bug rate to high feature created rate. I seem to keep inheriting things which were built with the opposite philosophy though. My boss asked me recently how I find bugs, whether I get them from the bug reporting system etc. I told him that they are everywhere, I just have to look at the code, or try adding a new feature and there they are...
There's some merit to the build crap fast approach though. You actually have something out the door much faster.
Yeah, one of the bosses at my workplace has had his car run out of fuel more than once in the past few months. Just too busy and optimistic about his car's range I guess.
Charge the Tesla like you'd recharge a power hungry smartphone.
Maybe some day we'd have hydrocarbon or alcohol fuel cell cars...
There's also Augmented Reality.
We're not far from virtual telepathy and telekinesis either. We're already communicating "like magic" with phones, and even buying stuff from vending machines with our phones. Some people are already going shopping, posting pics of something and asking their friends whether they should buy it. So just a few changes to the user interface, add some infra, standards and we'd be there.
Then we could pick different "Planes"/
"Augmented Reality Modes" depending on what we are trying to do in a particular area, and whether we have sufficient privileges. e.g. shopping, building maintenance, mall security.
I had one like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNqcYIHGaPM
Worth the money- more stable than the earlier ones. It's not that fragile BUT it will still break if you crash it too hard. The plastic ones are lighter and may perform better than the metal ones.
What I suggest you do is get your son started on one of those cheap mini remote control _cars_ first e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOp8We420Lc
Once he can master 2D, then only let him try 3D. Otherwise it'll just be frustrating for both you and him.
The issue is learning how to control something from the perspective of that something rather than yourself. Or even just mastering basic hand eye coordination. Not everyone is a natural at these things.
And after that, be prepared to buy more than one heli ;). They don't last that long anyway - the li-po battery doesn't last much more than 1 year. But they're cheap and they are a fair bit of fun for the money.
The specs are so amazing I do wonder if they are true.
All that and only 16g. Not easy to even get a high quality video camera+transmitter that weighs much less than 16g.
Of course for some perspective, you can compare the specs with a dragonfly or hummingbird to see there's still much progress to be made in some areas ;)
Dragonfly
weight about 1-3grams
fully autonomous
self refuelling, self manufacturing.
maximum speed about 30+kph.
nonstop flight - more than long enough for me:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/dragonfly-1.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8149000/8149714.stm
Some even fly at altitudes up to 6000 metres
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantala_flavescens
Hummingbird
weight : 3-4 grams typical, 8 grams max fuel.
nonstop flight - 800km with full fuel load.
flight speed max = 50-80kph
Right. And it probably sells something very similar to an AK-47 too.
The difference is that one is a toy and one is far more useful in a battlefield.
Show me a 16g heli with 30 minute flight time, stable in high winds, camera that _transmits_ live video (think battery life again), and can follow GPS coordinates (think yet more battery life).
;) ).
Provide a link to one that's less than $1000. Otherwise you can figure out where all the millions went.
I've seen interesting civilian/toy helis: e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3WBUVYZkODI
But none have specs anything as impressive as _claimed_ in the article. It does make me wonder whether the claims are all true. If it's true it's pretty impressive tech. In fact it actually is not far from some of those Sci-Fi stuff.
I've got toy helis, and without all those specs, they are toys.
8 minute flight time
requires pilot intervention in high winds.
no GPS
adding live hi-res video = even shorter flight time.
Not water proof (my guess is the drone is waterproof or it'll be a major oops
Says me and many other people.
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=15501
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=65293
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=118739
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=118790
As you can see the bugs aren't fringe stuff that only 0.1% of the people will encounter.
Maybe those OOo bugs are all fixed now, but we were talking about the past and why it was hard to make money from the product. My claim remains that the product was too crap to make substantial money from. How much would you pay for such crap? I wouldn't pay anything at all.
My exISP used to advertise/sell bandwidth based on the ADSL bandwidth.
The problem was my IP packets go over PPPoE which then goes over ATM and then over ADSL. ATM uses 53 byte cells with 5 byte overhead. That's about 10% in overheads (esp if you include everything else).
It was hard to make money from OpenOffice back then not because it was competing against a monopoly.
It's because for a very long time Star Office/OpenOffice/etc was crap. It was really crap, and I'm not talking about poor compatibility with MSO, just using its own document formats you still had crappy formatting bugs. Plenty of other terrible bugs- step by step search and replace within selection was broken (it would replace the entire selection!). MSO has/had it share of bugs but they are/were mostly not as bad as that.
It was so crap that I was telling people to use Kingsoft Office as an MSO alternative instead of OOo.