Adolscence of P1", by Thomas Ryan, in 1977 described software that would reside on a single computer (IBM mainframe) and use a straightforward AI algorithm to go across computer networks and attempted to break into the next computer, copy itself onto that next computer, and "root" itself (actually hijack the PSW - these were IBM mainframes) on that next machine. Eventually, P1 infects most of the mainframes in America, giving the programmer the ability to (among other things) avoid payment on his credit card. Unfortunatley, P1 gets widespread enough to start hogging noticeable resources and piss off the sys ops and other powers that be.
In short, Ryan mapped out both the structure and effect and an efficient internet virus in 1977. Given that P1 was widely read by com. sci types, and some friends and I actually toyed with writing a P1 style virus in the early 80's (we were too lazy/lame to figure out how to hijack the PSW), I assume there are computer viruses now that are the direct descendant of P1.
The first commerically successful "cyberspace" novel was "Neuromancer," by William Gibson. There are two worlds in Neuromancer: the corporeal world, run by corporations, and the cyberworld, which one "Jacks in" to via a computer hookup. IN cyberspace, data passes freely, but a lot work goes into protecting data from hackers. The protagonist is a hacker how specializes in stealing data. Sound familiar?
Gibson was so spot on that several commercial products use names from the book, eg BlackICE.
If you can find it, there is this great interview with William Gibson in which he discussed watching two kids playing pong (the original commercial video game, back in the 70s). Gibson realized that, for the players, the world behind the screen was just a real as a tennis court is to a tennis player. So Gibson pursued this "world behind the screen" metaphor and produced a striking, immersive world based an ubiquitous computers communicated via a world-wide standard network. This vision drove a lot of researchers, and still does. Many of us crave the fully, head mounted, immersive 3-D displays used in the book. But I'll take a pass on the Texas Catheter.
Grandma loves her Cobalt Qube. Web Server, NAT, multi-platform file server, firewall. AN instruction manual smaller and simpler than her new barbeque grill. and not a command line in sight.
Also remember: every happy TiVO user is a happy Linux user....
This is the quite of quick buck progress that makes me proud to have George W. as president and a congress that is acutioned off bienially. Take that, you euro-posers!
At 9 megapixel, you are at 35 MM photography resolution (assuming enough color depth - betwee 16 and 24 bit, if memory serves). With this display, the need for chemical photography evaporates for all but niche applications. True, for motion, this is complete overkill. The human eye/mind would be hard pressed to absorb this many pixels at 24 frames/seconds.
Think big: put two dozen in your house, network them, and every day you could live in a different world class museum. Or have you photo album be available via voice command instead of having to get it of a dusty shelf. or be surrounded by stunning high production value or porn. or whatever.
The resesearchers reached for 9 megapixel for a definite reason: 150 years of chemical photography says this is a resolution people really like for still pictures.
Yippeee! Mainstream gets a clue!
on
Linux and Shrek
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· Score: 2
From the article:
Linux is free in two senses. It can be obtained on the internet without charge, and its underlying source code can be freely studied and improved...
A non - tech reporter who understands the difference between Free Beerand Free Speech. And in the Wall Street Journal, of all places! This is a great day for Linux -- has any checked the for snowballs in Redmond ^H^H^H^H^H^H^HHell?
Yes, the sourced is open, but if Eazel still owns the code, they could very well do this. They have "property", the property definetly has some "value", and the property, namely the code ownership can be given to a non-profit. In fact, the natural home for this project, the GNU foundation, already exists.
Why would a VC bother? it's all about the Benjamins. See, companies buy other companies for tax losses all the time. Compag paid for about a 1/3 of the DEC acquisition just from DEC deferred tax losses. NO, the VCs won't get their full $13 million back, but with a few hundred thousand dolars spent on lawyers and accountants they could probably make back a few million. Not a bad ROI!
Thanks for the great legal quote -- and Jeffersonian ideal as well. A pretty scathing indictment of the current patent "system."
However, your conclusion is ironic in light of American history. If there is a single belief that unites Americans across the sapce of the continent and through 4 centuries of existence, it is the belief that the rest of the world is going to "hell in a handbasket." if they don't do something about it. This both a source of American society's penchant for renewal and the American sense of superiority that the rest of the world so resents.
I would like to exhibit Cotton Mather, an influential man in his day, who loved to preach about how the country was falling appart adn vigourous action was call for immediately to save the "city on the hill" -- right up until the time he led the Salem Witch trials.
So keep up the pessimism -- it's patriotic! (oh - and I agree with you that the patent system has run amuck and is violating it founding principles)
Defending Bill Gates on/. does seem foolish, but I have some spare karma. here goes
Bill bought the Codex Leicester from noted ego-maniac and proven liar Armand Hammer. Dr. Hammer had renamed the book "Codex Hammer" and not allowed public viewing.
Since acquisition, Bill has loaned it out for public display and now keeps in a museum in Seattle.
Yes, Bill, through his solely ownded Corbis, did buy the Betteman Archive and Corbis does charge for access.
BUT, the Archive was in private hands, was (literally) falling apart, was in a building the NY Times deems a "fire risk," (on old warehouse), and only a teeny portion of it was digitized.
Corbis has given the archive a proper physical home and moved much of the archive online. No one else was willing and able to invest these kinds of millions
Bill is stil an evil, rotten bastard -- even Nero did some good public works
I've been married 9 years. My desire for work has gone down, my time at home has gone up. I am ALWAYS home by 6 pm. I walk my daughter to school at 8:30 am. I volunteer in her classroom. I never work weekends. Do the math for yourself. OH, I am USian.
As another poster wrote, " You can love your job, but can your job love you back?"
The executive, Irving Wladawsky- Berger, an I.B.M. vice president, said, "If we thought this was a trap, we wouldn't be doing it, and as you know, we have a lot of lawyers."
Re:The Eventual Downfall of Every Man
on
Coder on the Cross
·
· Score: 2
Moderators, sorry this is offtopic, but a common intellectual error has occurred.
"Think again before postulating the drive to self preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being.".
Close, but no Cigar
The cardinal drive is SELF_PROPAGATION. Think of this planet's most successful animals (as measured by biomass): ants. Individual ants have little sense of self-preservation -- but are wickedly well adapted at self-propagation via the queen. This story plays out again and again. Things that successfully self-propagate (ants, bacteria, internet jokes, the GPL) tend to stick around. Things that don't (sterile mutants, incomprehensible jokes,dot.com startups) tend to vanish
When you can get your basic component matched to your job, using a whole heck of a lot of identical peices oftens SAVES money. The trick is that those pieces must (1) be cheap to mass produce and (2) do their job without any "supervison," like the bricks in my house. Google appears to have done exaclty that with their automated/remote management cusotmizations.
Just think, my house uses over 8,000 identical bricks. The phone system relies on hundreds of thousands of fiber optic strands. And don't even think about CPUs: all those identical transitors
Steve Jobs has the identical vision and is working hard to make it come true. Although a colossal failure, this is what the Cube was trying to be. Remember the Lisa? Steve will be back.
Mind you, I'm not saying "buy Apple." Apple is mostly closed and Steve is an arse. But this large company with a proven record rolling out (consumer) innovations is working hard on your dream -- all built up from BSD
Just as Open Source has coopted so much from UNIX and Windows, so Open Source will coopt "convergence" from Apple -- with little of the corporate control other posters (rightly) fear so much.
I have no quarrel with your science. However, you seem to have a weaker grasp of the economics. you wrote:
The pollution quota system proposed by the US will help with the climate problem!... Only an over all reduction of greenhouse gasses will help
While it is true that global climate won't respond to bits of paper, the human economy does. Forty years of air pollution regulation here in California has shown that authoritarian dictates "Thou shalt do this..." only get one so far...and expensively so. The idea of the quota system is that we can get to the lower emissions scenarios *cheaper*. If the government says "all emitters must reduce by 20%", then I won't bother changing my bakery much, even though I could easily cut 80%. However, the furniture maker can't get his 20% cut without risking bankruptcy. Under the pollution trading credit regime, my bakery invests in more efficient gas furnaces and makes a big cut of 80%. The furniture maker buys the excess cut from me, (helping pay for my new equipment) cheaper than he can change his own factory. Emissions target are reached and now bankruptcy.-- but the "clearner" business are more profitable.
If you don't like the "pollution market" approach, how else do you propose to getting the cooperatiom of of hundreds of millions of people needed with using authoritarian methods?
What you described sounds a lot like XNS. The software is all open source, although commericial service providers are needed to make it go. One of the service providers owns the key patents, but they have committed to royalty free use for their competitors.
Thanks for your good post. I basically agree with you. In several crucial markets, particuarly US Domestic distribution, Standard Oil (SO) did achieve effective total monopoly. A couple of caveats: The SpindleTop discovery ended SO's stranglehold on crude production long before the courts broke up SO, and by the turn of the century, the relevant market for petroluem was worldwide, not coutnry by country. And here, SO never got to monopoly (despite vigorous effort). If you're interested, Email me about he history of Shell and BP, or read chapters 5 & 6 of"The Prize" by Yergin.
You are correct that my Brittanica link did not fully support my conclusion. Slashdotters are not reknowned for their long attention spans, so I keep my posts brief.
Since you've read this far, let me take more of your time and tell a fuller story. It's more intersting. Sadly, I don't have supporting links handy
As Kali points out, ATT reached for monopoly via "standard laissez faire." If memory serves, they had about a 70-80% market share when, as Kali correctly points out, they bought themselves anti-trust protection and stomped the rest of their market. While we'll never know, many (myself included) doubt that ATT would ever have reached their ultimate 95%+ penetration without government help. Microsoft seems stuck in the 90-95% range, and even Standard Oil never got that far.
Back on topic, Kali is missing a key fact. Consistent with " standard laissez faire," the ATT "monopoly" was already under attack. Ever wonder why security companies get their bare copper provided to them by the telcos on the cheap? ah, there is a tale. By the 1910s, Private alarm companies had sprung up that were laying their own copper. ATT realized that this was a competing infrastructure, so they cut a deal: we'll give you our copper cheap, you stay out of voice. This was formalized in the rate tariffs as the government set concrete on ATTs "monopoly." And there matters stayed, until DSL pioneers staring ordering bare copper "security alarm" lines for their data networks. Nasty lawsuits/hearings ensued, where this juicy history turned up.
... and if mine was the "one of the most asinine conclusions [you]'ve ever seen," kali you are clearly new to slashdot.
Can't you realize that government regulation got rid of the AT&T monopoly?
This is only half true. During telephony's first 1/2 century ( roughty 1875-1920), vigorous competition was the norm.
From Brittanica:
After the Bell Company's patent on the telephone expired in 1894, it encountered growing competition from
independent phone companies and telephone manufacturers....
In a commitment first enunciated in 1913 but affirmed by the Graham-Willis Act of 1921, AT&T, as a monopoly," agreed to provide long-distance service to all independent telephone companies. By 1939 AT&T controlled 83 percent of all U.S. telephones and 98 percent of all long-distance telephone lines and manufactured 90 percent of all U.S. phone equipment.
That's right, ATT was facing growing competition, so they had the government declare them a "natural monopoly." In 1984, the government was just trying to undue the mistake it had made 60 years earlier.
I particularly disagree with your definition of 'insight'
This being slashdot, I was not being precise. I suspect that we actually are in close agreement. I fully agree that the actual "spark of brilliance" is almost always an intensely individual event. How many great works of art were done by committee? I also agree that great insight typically (but not always) requires "unadulterated genius." (occasionally perfectly pedestrian minds stumble across import insights)
My original point is that history shows that the individuals who produce the great insights usually do so in the context of stimulating peer interaction. The thought is wholly their own, but without the context of informed, questioning peers the spark of genius rarely ignites. And it is this that makes me pessimistic about the coming Wolfram contribution. Stephen has _completely_ cut himself off from feedback, constructive or otherwise. He may pull it off, but this approach is at odds with the historical record.
While it is true that the peer review process is, as you say, the validator and not the initiator of insight, the vast major of advances in insight come from interaction with peers. Contrary to the myth, there d*mn few examples of the "lone genius." Einstein, Liebniz, Darwin, Newton, Galileo, Watson & Crick, Gauss, Archimedes....all don't qualify. Mendel is about the only one I can think of who does.
The "stereotypical mad scientist" is so popular because it is an incredibly useful device for narrative -- it spares having to explain to the audience how the "McGuffin" (to use Hitchcock's term) came about. Also, the "mad scientist" or "lone inventor" is a comforting myth for non-technical types, so it is in the self-interest of technical innovators to nurture the myth, even if it is utterly untrue.
Nope. I am not trolling. I have worked with Stephen's colleagues. I have used SMP (The Mathematica predecessor he wrote while still at CalTech). I have used Mathematica extensively.
Stephen is a smart guy, certainly way smarter than I am. But his "genius" is seriously over-rated, particularly by whoever writes his press releases. Those I know who have actually worked with Stephen are more impressed by his ego than by his insights (Dick Feynman being a notable exception).
As for Mathematica being "one of the most amazing computer programs ever produced," well, I dunno. Certainly an ambitious attempt. But whenever I've needed to get real work done, I found that while Mathematica could (in principle) do it, it simply was too overwrought and cumbersome to be competitive with other available solutions....and Mathematica was far from a "solo" effort.
Assuming most laptops can manage two hours battery time, do we really need that much more?
YES.
In my household the laptops are *off* the ac power most of the time. We are a fully enabled 802.11 (Aiport / wireless ethernet) house. We surf/email from everywhere, including the bathroom, the back porch, and the neighbors lawn. Our aging Fujitsu, with under 2 hrs of battery, seems like a piece of crap next to the 4 hr+ battery time we get from the Powerbook.
As computing go wireless, battery life is the most important spec.
Slashdot Mirror
you mean like an Australian Media empire? Been there, done that ( Changing media ownership rules for Robert Murdoch/News Corp)
Or funding a war when an oil company tires of funding it's own private army. Check. (Plan Columbia is mighty helpful for Anglo/Dutch Shell Oil)
There were even those that claimed Clinton backed MFN for China based on campaign contributions.
It's about the highest bidder, not some quaint notion like "sovereignty"
Adolscence of P1", by Thomas Ryan, in 1977 described software that would reside on a single computer (IBM mainframe) and use a straightforward AI algorithm to go across computer networks and attempted to break into the next computer, copy itself onto that next computer, and "root" itself (actually hijack the PSW - these were IBM mainframes) on that next machine. Eventually, P1 infects most of the mainframes in America, giving the programmer the ability to (among other things) avoid payment on his credit card. Unfortunatley, P1 gets widespread enough to start hogging noticeable resources and piss off the sys ops and other powers that be.
In short, Ryan mapped out both the structure and effect and an efficient internet virus in 1977. Given that P1 was
widely read by com. sci types, and some friends and I actually toyed with writing a P1 style virus in the early 80's (we were too lazy/lame to figure out how to hijack the PSW), I assume there are computer viruses now that are the direct descendant of P1.
The first commerically successful "cyberspace" novel was "Neuromancer," by William Gibson. There are two worlds in Neuromancer: the corporeal world, run by corporations, and the cyberworld, which one "Jacks in" to via a computer hookup. IN cyberspace, data passes freely, but a lot work goes into protecting data from hackers. The protagonist is a hacker how specializes in stealing data. Sound familiar?
Gibson was so spot on that several commercial products use names from the book, eg BlackICE.
If you can find it, there is this great interview with William Gibson in which he discussed watching two kids playing pong (the original commercial video game, back in the 70s). Gibson realized that, for the players, the world behind the screen was just a real as a tennis court is to a tennis player. So Gibson pursued this "world behind the screen" metaphor and produced a striking, immersive world based an ubiquitous computers communicated via a world-wide standard network. This vision drove a lot of researchers, and still does. Many of us crave the fully, head mounted, immersive 3-D displays used in the book. But I'll take a pass on the Texas Catheter.
I did. She loves it.
Grandma loves her Cobalt Qube. Web Server, NAT, multi-platform file server, firewall. AN instruction manual smaller and simpler than her new barbeque grill. and not a command line in sight.
Also remember: every happy TiVO user is a happy Linux user....
This is the quite of quick buck progress that makes me proud to have George W. as president and a congress that is acutioned off bienially. Take that, you euro-posers!
At 9 megapixel, you are at 35 MM photography resolution (assuming enough color depth - betwee 16 and 24 bit, if memory serves). With this display, the need for chemical photography evaporates for all but niche applications. True, for motion, this is complete overkill. The human eye/mind would be hard pressed to absorb this many pixels at 24 frames/seconds.
Think big: put two dozen in your house, network them, and every day you could live in a different world class museum. Or have you photo album be available via voice command instead of having to get it of a dusty shelf. or be surrounded by stunning high production value or porn. or whatever.
The resesearchers reached for 9 megapixel for a definite reason: 150 years of chemical photography says this is a resolution people really like for still pictures.
A non - tech reporter who understands the difference between Free Beerand Free Speech. And in the Wall Street Journal, of all places! This is a great day for Linux -- has any checked the for snowballs in Redmond ^H^H^H^H^H^H^HHell?
Yes, the sourced is open, but if Eazel still owns the code, they could very well do this. They have "property", the property definetly has some "value", and the property, namely the code ownership can be given to a non-profit. In fact, the natural home for this project, the GNU foundation, already exists.
Why would a VC bother? it's all about the Benjamins. See, companies buy other companies for tax losses all the time. Compag paid for about a 1/3 of the DEC acquisition just from DEC deferred tax losses. NO, the VCs won't get their full $13 million back, but with a few hundred thousand dolars spent on lawyers and accountants they could probably make back a few million. Not a bad ROI!
However, your conclusion is ironic in light of American history. If there is a single belief that unites Americans across the sapce of the continent and through 4 centuries of existence, it is the belief that the rest of the world is going to "hell in a handbasket." if they don't do something about it. This both a source of American society's penchant for renewal and the American sense of superiority that the rest of the world so resents.
I would like to exhibit Cotton Mather, an influential man in his day, who loved to preach about how the country was falling appart adn vigourous action was call for immediately to save the "city on the hill" -- right up until the time he led the Salem Witch trials.
So keep up the pessimism -- it's patriotic! (oh - and I agree with you that the patent system has run amuck and is violating it founding principles)
Defending Bill Gates on /. does seem foolish, but I have some spare karma. here goes
Bill bought the Codex Leicester from noted ego-maniac and proven liar Armand Hammer. Dr. Hammer had renamed the book "Codex Hammer" and not allowed public viewing.
Since acquisition, Bill has loaned it out for public display and now keeps in a museum in Seattle.
Yes, Bill, through his solely ownded Corbis, did buy the Betteman Archive and Corbis does charge for access.
BUT, the Archive was in private hands, was (literally) falling apart, was in a building the NY Times deems a "fire risk," (on old warehouse), and only a teeny portion of it was digitized.
Corbis has given the archive a proper physical home and moved much of the archive online. No one else was willing and able to invest these kinds of millions
Bill is stil an evil, rotten bastard -- even Nero did some good public works
I've been married 9 years. My desire for work has gone down, my time at home has gone up. I am ALWAYS home by 6 pm. I walk my daughter to school at 8:30 am. I volunteer in her classroom. I never work weekends. Do the math for yourself. OH, I am USian.
As another poster wrote, " You can love your job, but can your job love you back?"
Moderators, sorry this is offtopic, but a common intellectual error has occurred.
Close, but no Cigar
The cardinal drive is SELF_PROPAGATION. Think of this planet's most successful animals (as measured by biomass): ants. Individual ants have little sense of self-preservation -- but are wickedly well adapted at self-propagation via the queen. This story plays out again and again. Things that successfully self-propagate (ants, bacteria, internet jokes, the GPL) tend to stick around. Things that don't (sterile mutants, incomprehensible jokes ,dot.com startups) tend to vanish
OK Back on topic now.
Not to me
When you can get your basic component matched to your job, using a whole heck of a lot of identical peices oftens SAVES money. The trick is that those pieces must (1) be cheap to mass produce and (2) do their job without any "supervison," like the bricks in my house. Google appears to have done exaclty that with their automated/remote management cusotmizations.Just think, my house uses over 8,000 identical bricks. The phone system relies on hundreds of thousands of fiber optic strands. And don't even think about CPUs: all those identical transitors
Taco, not too worry.
Steve Jobs has the identical vision and is working hard to make it come true. Although a colossal failure, this is what the Cube was trying to be. Remember the Lisa? Steve will be back.
Mind you, I'm not saying "buy Apple." Apple is mostly closed and Steve is an arse. But this large company with a proven record rolling out (consumer) innovations is working hard on your dream -- all built up from BSDJust as Open Source has coopted so much from UNIX and Windows, so Open Source will coopt "convergence" from Apple -- with little of the corporate control other posters (rightly) fear so much.
All good things come to those who wait
EXCELLENT POST
I have no quarrel with your science. However, you seem to have a weaker grasp of the economics. you wrote:
While it is true that global climate won't respond to bits of paper, the human economy does. Forty years of air pollution regulation here in California has shown that authoritarian dictates "Thou shalt do this..." only get one so far...and expensively so. The idea of the quota system is that we can get to the lower emissions scenarios *cheaper*. If the government says "all emitters must reduce by 20%", then I won't bother changing my bakery much, even though I could easily cut 80%. However, the furniture maker can't get his 20% cut without risking bankruptcy. Under the pollution trading credit regime, my bakery invests in more efficient gas furnaces and makes a big cut of 80%. The furniture maker buys the excess cut from me, (helping pay for my new equipment) cheaper than he can change his own factory. Emissions target are reached and now bankruptcy.-- but the "clearner" business are more profitable.If you don't like the "pollution market" approach, how else do you propose to getting the cooperatiom of of hundreds of millions of people needed with using authoritarian methods?
What you described sounds a lot like XNS. The software is all open source, although commericial service providers are needed to make it go. One of the service providers owns the key patents, but they have committed to royalty free use for their competitors.
unc_onnected,
Thanks for your good post. I basically agree with you. In several crucial markets, particuarly US Domestic distribution, Standard Oil (SO) did achieve effective total monopoly. A couple of caveats: The SpindleTop discovery ended SO's stranglehold on crude production long before the courts broke up SO, and by the turn of the century, the relevant market for petroluem was worldwide, not coutnry by country. And here, SO never got to monopoly (despite vigorous effort). If you're interested, Email me about he history of Shell and BP, or read chapters 5 & 6 of"The Prize" by Yergin.
Thanks for the good post.
kali,
You are correct that my Brittanica link did not fully support my conclusion. Slashdotters are not reknowned for their long attention spans, so I keep my posts brief.
Since you've read this far, let me take more of your time and tell a fuller story. It's more intersting. Sadly, I don't have supporting links handy
As Kali points out, ATT reached for monopoly via "standard laissez faire ." If memory serves, they had about a 70-80% market share when, as Kali correctly points out, they bought themselves anti-trust protection and stomped the rest of their market. While we'll never know, many (myself included) doubt that ATT would ever have reached their ultimate 95%+ penetration without government help. Microsoft seems stuck in the 90-95% range, and even Standard Oil never got that far.
Back on topic, Kali is missing a key fact. Consistent with " standard laissez faire," the ATT "monopoly" was already under attack. Ever wonder why security companies get their bare copper provided to them by the telcos on the cheap? ah, there is a tale. By the 1910s, Private alarm companies had sprung up that were laying their own copper. ATT realized that this was a competing infrastructure, so they cut a deal: we'll give you our copper cheap, you stay out of voice. This was formalized in the rate tariffs as the government set concrete on ATTs "monopoly." And there matters stayed, until DSL pioneers staring ordering bare copper "security alarm" lines for their data networks. Nasty lawsuits/hearings ensued, where this juicy history turned up.
... and if mine was the "one of the most asinine conclusions [you]'ve ever seen," kali you are clearly new to slashdot.
Can't you realize that government regulation got rid of the AT&T monopoly?
This is only half true. During telephony's first 1/2 century ( roughty 1875-1920), vigorous competition was the norm. From Brittanica:
That's right, ATT was facing growing competition, so they had the government declare them a "natural monopoly." In 1984, the government was just trying to undue the mistake it had made 60 years earlier.
I particularly disagree with your definition of 'insight'
This being slashdot, I was not being precise. I suspect that we actually are in close agreement. I fully agree that the actual "spark of brilliance" is almost always an intensely individual event. How many great works of art were done by committee? I also agree that great insight typically (but not always) requires "unadulterated genius." (occasionally perfectly pedestrian minds stumble across import insights)
My original point is that history shows that the individuals who produce the great insights usually do so in the context of stimulating peer interaction. The thought is wholly their own, but without the context of informed, questioning peers the spark of genius rarely ignites. And it is this that makes me pessimistic about the coming Wolfram contribution. Stephen has _completely_ cut himself off from feedback, constructive or otherwise. He may pull it off, but this approach is at odds with the historical record.
strangely, in the next sediment layer below their sample, the geologists found the following rock formation:
oooooooooooooooo
oFFFFFooPPPPPo
oFoooooooPoooPo
oFFFFFooPPPPPo
oFoooooooPooooo
oFoooooooPooooo
ooooooooooooooo
..............
While it is true that the peer review process is, as you say, the validator and not the initiator of insight, the vast major of advances in insight come from interaction with peers. Contrary to the myth, there d*mn few examples of the "lone genius." Einstein, Liebniz, Darwin, Newton, Galileo, Watson & Crick, Gauss, Archimedes....all don't qualify. Mendel is about the only one I can think of who does.
The "stereotypical mad scientist" is so popular because it is an incredibly useful device for narrative -- it spares having to explain to the audience how the "McGuffin" (to use Hitchcock's term) came about. Also, the "mad scientist" or "lone inventor" is a comforting myth for non-technical types, so it is in the self-interest of technical innovators to nurture the myth, even if it is utterly untrue.Nope. I am not trolling. I have worked with Stephen's colleagues. I have used SMP (The Mathematica predecessor he wrote while still at CalTech). I have used Mathematica extensively.
Stephen is a smart guy, certainly way smarter than I am. But his "genius" is seriously over-rated, particularly by whoever writes his press releases. Those I know who have actually worked with Stephen are more impressed by his ego than by his insights (Dick Feynman being a notable exception).As for Mathematica being "one of the most amazing computer programs ever produced," well, I dunno. Certainly an ambitious attempt. But whenever I've needed to get real work done, I found that while Mathematica could (in principle) do it, it simply was too overwrought and cumbersome to be competitive with other available solutions. ...and Mathematica was far from a "solo" effort.
Assuming most laptops can manage two hours battery time, do we really need that much more?
YES.
In my household the laptops are *off* the ac power most of the time. We are a fully enabled 802.11 (Aiport / wireless ethernet) house. We surf/email from everywhere, including the bathroom, the back porch, and the neighbors lawn. Our aging Fujitsu, with under 2 hrs of battery, seems like a piece of crap next to the 4 hr+ battery time we get from the Powerbook.
As computing go wireless, battery life is the most important spec.