1) a MUD. This is actually a great, simple OO project with lots of potential for add ons. A first version can be a simple ZORK like environment/game. Then you can add multi-user network access, additional powers, spells, NPCs,a gui etc. You can add rudementry AI (for the NPCs) even.
2) Applets. People like to show off. Give them something that they can post on a web page. Game of life, fractals, and other nifty graphics are good beginning projects (when java was in beta, those were what my first few applets were about).
3) A web based MP3 data base. This would be a cgi script type project. A web form would provide access to a music data base, and let people down load the mp3 files they found.
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." -- Leslie Lamport
1) Fault Tolerance: programs can re-continue execution even though some of the processors and memory that they reside on cease to function.
2) Performance Benifits from Parallelism: distribute threads of execution across the global computational grid.
3) Share Resources Efficiently: don't waste those idel CPU cycles. Don't waste that extra main memory. This may be the least valid reason, as cpu cycles and memory have a big head start over bandwidth on the value vs. time scale. Moore's law has all of them getting exponentially cheaper over time, but right now bandwidth is the most valuable of the three.
4) Support a New Generation of Applications: Distributed operating systems can offer unique support for things like shared virtual environments, or widly distributed databases. It is a classic point of contention whether the distributed system services should be implemented on the application layer, or on some lower layer. However, I don't think anyone can argue that in terms of ease of application development, it is often very nice to have a really nice abstraction available on which to base your app.
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." -- Leslie Lamport
Aside for information on the origin of the outer planets, and the make up of the outer solar system, there are the Migo. The fungi from yuggoth who have been visiting our planet for millenia make their home on pluto and have colonies on its moon charon. But what if their pluto base is itself just a colony for a much larger galactic civilization?
And there are all those stolen brains that could be recovered. Since many of these come from hundreds of years past, at the least they would be of historical interest.
(-;
And down the nether pits to that foul lake Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep. But oh! If only they would make some sound, Or wear a face where faces should be found! -- HPL
The article describes us as having reached a flat section of the price per pound/demand curve, but it neglects the other factor that drives demand: the price to develop and build stuff that can create value when launched into orbit. An also ignored and related factor is the ability to make the stuff that you launch inexpensive to maintain, and light weight given launch costs. Lets face it, if I could build a robust iridium style system cheaply enough, 10,000 bucks a pound would not be a problem.
Well, first let me fess up that I have not read this book (right now I am in the middle of reading Souls in the Great Machine, which is appropriate since I just finished grading 'Intro to Programming with Java' tests, and feel like a FUNCTION component). But as far as the debate concerning the existance of an all powerful being that created life and which we should worship, I don't think the aliens have too much to go on.
Lets say that all life in the universe did appear at the same time (I guess at the end of the 20th century, the idea that god exists would need some kind of absurd handicap to be plausible). So some intelligent entity using very advanced techniques, but this doesn't mean God, so much as beings that to us are as gods. But in either case, I'd not be so much inclined to worship these things, as to try and pirate their knowledge.
IMHO it will be fuckin cool to replace my body hair with yak fur. Oh, add on regeneration, 20/5 night vision, horns and springy legs!
The problems will come from people hating, fearing, and attacking other people because of the info in the some 40,000 (out of the 3.1 billion) base pairs that are different from the info in their 40,000 unique base pairs.
This is really funny. At the schools I went to (University of Oregon, University of Texas Austin), we learned everything on Unix. They emphasized algorithms, data structures, and OO programming concepts foremost. Not too much assembly language unless you really wanted it though. Everything was unix based. Even the user interfaces course (optional) used Tcl/Tk.
There was one professor who kept badgering the department to put in a windows machine, until during my senior year 3 sad looking NT boxes appeared in the back of a lab filled with sparc 5s. I remember thinking that while these NT machines are pretty crappy for writing software on, they do make very nice typewriters.
The next Steve Wozniak will be the person who mass-markets DNA computation for the desk top. It might look like a little gel bag with a few USB and video ports.
Paul Di Flippo wrote a truly gnarly set of interconnected short stories that exptrapolate on the whole biotech revolution. It includes cyberpunk style DNA hackers -- Watsons and Cricks. The book is called Ribofunk.
Its almost a cliche to say that tech is not good, or evil in and of itself. Obviously how tech is used has a great effect on what whether it helps or hurts people. But tech can also push people toward certain uses, because it offers potentialities that people will want to exploit.
Seems to me the internet has two big potentialities:
One is disseminating and sharing information-- political, musical, cultural, technological. Since we trade via the exchange of information, this includes e-commerce.
The other is gathering information about what information people are accessing/transmitting. In the US, the second potentiality means spyware, selling user info, and the NSA. In china this means the government tracking down disidents by their IP.
Dumb that the yahoo article doesn't have a link. Here it is: http://www.invent.org/index.html Seymour Cray is there, and so is William Burroughs! No, not *that* William Burroughs. (-; Weird that they don't have Eckert or Mockley there. Also the don't have John Von Neuman. In the case of Von Neuman, this no doubt because the invention must be covered by a US patent (as per explaination on web page). This makes sense for Neuman (imagine if he had patented shared memory architectures) but what not with regard to Eckert and Mockley. At least I *think* they had some patent for the Enaic...
Slashdot Mirror
2) Applets. People like to show off. Give them something that they can post on a web page. Game of life, fractals, and other nifty graphics are good beginning projects (when java was in beta, those were what my first few applets were about).
3) A web based MP3 data base. This would be a cgi script type project. A web form would provide access to a music data base, and let people down load the mp3 files they found.
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." -- Leslie Lamport
2) Performance Benifits from Parallelism: distribute threads of execution across the global computational grid.
3) Share Resources Efficiently: don't waste those idel CPU cycles. Don't waste that extra main memory. This may be the least valid reason, as cpu cycles and memory have a big head start over bandwidth on the value vs. time scale. Moore's law has all of them getting exponentially cheaper over time, but right now bandwidth is the most valuable of the three.
4) Support a New Generation of Applications: Distributed operating systems can offer unique support for things like shared virtual environments, or widly distributed databases. It is a classic point of contention whether the distributed system services should be implemented on the application layer, or on some lower layer. However, I don't think anyone can argue that in terms of ease of application development, it is often very nice to have a really nice abstraction available on which to base your app.
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." -- Leslie Lamport
And there are all those stolen brains that could be recovered. Since many of these come from hundreds of years past, at the least they would be of historical interest.
(-;
And down the nether pits to that foul lake Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep. But oh! If only they would make some sound, Or wear a face where faces should be found! -- HPL
The article describes us as having reached a flat section of the price per pound/demand curve, but it neglects the other factor that drives demand: the price to develop and build stuff that can create value when launched into orbit. An also ignored and related factor is the ability to make the stuff that you launch inexpensive to maintain, and light weight given launch costs. Lets face it, if I could build a robust iridium style system cheaply enough, 10,000 bucks a pound would not be a problem.
Lets say that all life in the universe did appear at the same time (I guess at the end of the 20th century, the idea that god exists would need some kind of absurd handicap to be plausible). So some intelligent entity using very advanced techniques, but this doesn't mean God, so much as beings that to us are as gods. But in either case, I'd not be so much inclined to worship these things, as to try and pirate their knowledge.
IMHO it will be fuckin cool to replace my body hair with yak fur. Oh, add on regeneration, 20/5 night vision, horns and springy legs!
The problems will come from people hating, fearing, and attacking other people because of the info in the some 40,000 (out of the 3.1 billion) base pairs that are different from the info in their 40,000 unique base pairs.
Here is another internet draft, which describes the thinking that went into the design of the protocol.
There was one professor who kept badgering the department to put in a windows machine, until during my senior year 3 sad looking NT boxes appeared in the back of a lab filled with sparc 5s. I remember thinking that while these NT machines are pretty crappy for writing software on, they do make very nice typewriters.
Paul Di Flippo wrote a truly gnarly set of interconnected short stories that exptrapolate on the whole biotech revolution. It includes cyberpunk style DNA hackers -- Watsons and Cricks. The book is called Ribofunk.
Seems to me the internet has two big potentialities:
One is disseminating and sharing information-- political, musical, cultural, technological. Since we trade via the exchange of information, this includes e-commerce.
The other is gathering information about what information people are accessing/transmitting. In the US, the second potentiality means spyware, selling user info, and the NSA. In china this means the government tracking down disidents by their IP.
Dumb that the yahoo article doesn't have a link. Here it is: http://www.invent.org/index.html Seymour Cray is there, and so is William Burroughs! No, not *that* William Burroughs. (-; Weird that they don't have Eckert or Mockley there. Also the don't have John Von Neuman. In the case of Von Neuman, this no doubt because the invention must be covered by a US patent (as per explaination on web page). This makes sense for Neuman (imagine if he had patented shared memory architectures) but what not with regard to Eckert and Mockley. At least I *think* they had some patent for the Enaic...