Some very apt points, but I'd like to make a couple of corrections:
IBM in fact has demonstrated Shor's algorithm
I'm not certain that IBM hasn't done something similar, but I believe that the work you're referring to is an experiment at Los Alamos which used Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and lasers to manipulate nuclear spins as qubits.
... the "gates" are in fact carefully crafted laser pulses...
Again, this is true in the Los Alamose experiment, but in general, gates can take on a bunch of different forms. In an NMR system, pulsed lasers are gates; in optical systems, things beam splitters and phase shifters (and the qubits do travel between gates); in solid-state systems, different electric fields are used to manipulate states.
one should note also that the only reason apple posted a loss was that it had to pay a one-time restructuring fee. without that, it would have actually posted an $11M profit, which would be a drop (from $38M last Q1), but a far less dramatic one than the loss they indicated.
my university just installed wireless access points in all the libraries and checking out laptops with 802.11b cards in them, specifically, Cisco Aironet 350 cards. these cards have a small antenna that protrudes about 2cm from the slot. and cisco just released drivers for OS 9.X and OS X.
there are people who have caught on to this long before us: balance of "energies"--if you will, a representation of the consequences of our actions--has been a central focal point of several eastern religions since time immemorial. more recently, a practitioner of wicca once told me that their religion is about finding a balance between "good" and "bad" things.
it's interesting to contrast how christianity, and by extension (the influence is there whether or not we like it), most of american and western culture, believe in an "ultimate good" which is to be achieved--whose achievement is happiness.
it seems like such a static view of the world to me: a slow trudge toward some unreachable goal rather than a flow of plusses and minuses.
i fail to see which part of the first amendment this bill violates: the 1st amendment guarantees the people the freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of petition, and of peaceable assembly. playing point-and-shoot video games in public places, i think, constitutes none of these.
one could, of course, argue that playing video games, like burning draft cards or contributing to a political campaign, is a form of speech and therefore protected. but in order for an action to be a form of speech, i would think that the person performing the action would be trying to communicate something. i don't know if i speak for everyone, but when i play games, i'm just trying to have fun, not make any kind of political statement. (of course, if this law should pass...)
really, i agree with everyone else that this is a dumb law that encourages parental irresponsibility, but i really can't see any constitutional (especially first-amendment) grounds to oppose it on.
i work as a neural modeler at a lab in a major university. we keep several "general purpose hackers" in the lab for things like optimizing our modeling code, making new random number generators, etc. here are some of the ways that our director recruits these folks:
-- he gives talks at 300-level cs classes and sees who shows up after class
-- he sends out a letter to the incoming students that have been chosen for the university's presigious scholarship programs in the fall (since if these people program, they're more likely to do it well)
funny, i'd always thought that the purpose of hardware, in the abstract, was to enable users to do things, but it seems like more and more, the purpose of hardware design in consumer machines is to restrict, or at least have a strong influence on, what the user does with his machine. just say no to copy-controlled drives and internet buttons on my keyboard and the windows key and whatever else forces me to think the way the corporations want me to.
I've had the pleasure of working with the network at a large university in Virginia, home of the Responsible Computing policy and a pretty-much laissez-faire policing system.
Ground rule (and pretty much the only one I've seen): Do what you want, but don't affect other users' access to the system and IT won't bother you.
Students can run whatever kind of servers they want out of their rooms, and they're not behind any kind of firewall. On top of that, the staff have no access to account information unless it's to add/remove, or reset a password to let someone in.
This obviously opens a lot of doors, but the University counters that with an instant termination policy. You start taking up 20% of the University's bandwith and they cut off your connection. You set up your own DHCP server, and they cut off your connection.
For those of you who are interested in learning more than what the Times gives, the full write-up is in this week's Nature (free registration required). I would link to it, but the way they have their CGI stuff set up complicates things. To find it, go to Nature's website, then follow the Contents link on the right, then go to this week's magazine; the article is titled "Neural engineering: Real brains for real robots", it's in the News and Views section, and it starts on page 305.
Happy reading....
If anyone has a MacOS (7-X) system up and running already and wants some tools right now, they can follow the instructions from MacAddict on how to copy the Darwin versions of g++ and company over to MacOS.
For those interested in other BSD apps on OS X, keep an eye on MacAddict's Ports page.
I think we need to contract our focus here: in reading Gelerenter's manifesto, think about the UI rather than the underlying machines. What Gelerenter is proposing is a new way of interacting with the machines we have; a way of making human-machine interation more intuitive for the average user. To a user, accessing a document by asking for "that picture I took of my kids last sunday at the lake" rather than "kidpic.jpg" is as big a leap as asking for "kidpic.jpg" instead of "0:3:0x45FF3F2". What Gelerenter wants is a computer that's not a computer. He wants a computer that thinks for him, that sorts the files he inputs in a way that's closer to the way his mind sorts them than to the way his mind tells his filing cabinet to sort them. He wants to throw out a hierarchical structure in favor of a distributed structure based on content. When I try to see the type of organization that Gelerenter describes, I visualize something like a Visual Thesaurus, with directories being replaced by abstract nodes, eg "lake", "kids", "photos", and files being appropriately connected t o those nodes through their content. Yes, this can be achived through links and directories, but what Gelerenter wants is something to do it for him, something that will organize a filesystem for the average user. So despite all his anti-Linux hndwaving, what Gelerenter really wants isn't a whole new paradigm, but just a whole new UI. A UI that thinks for the user so that (s)he doesn't have to.
Slashdot Mirror
... Leopard wins!
fyi, here's the Original Press release from apple and the Quicktime broadcast of the conference call in which the statements are announced.
one should note also that the only reason apple posted a loss was that it had to pay a one-time restructuring fee. without that, it would have actually posted an $11M profit, which would be a drop (from $38M last Q1), but a far less dramatic one than the loss they indicated.
my university just installed wireless access points in all the libraries and checking out laptops with 802.11b cards in them, specifically, Cisco Aironet 350 cards. these cards have a small antenna that protrudes about 2cm from the slot. and cisco just released drivers for OS 9.X and OS X.
works great with my TiBook!
there are people who have caught on to this long before us: balance of "energies"--if you will, a representation of the consequences of our actions--has been a central focal point of several eastern religions since time immemorial. more recently, a practitioner of wicca once told me that their religion is about finding a balance between "good" and "bad" things.
it's interesting to contrast how christianity, and by extension (the influence is there whether or not we like it), most of american and western culture, believe in an "ultimate good" which is to be achieved--whose achievement is happiness.
it seems like such a static view of the world to me: a slow trudge toward some unreachable goal rather than a flow of plusses and minuses.
me, i'll have my coffee *and* my wine!
i fail to see which part of the first amendment this bill violates: the 1st amendment guarantees the people the freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of petition, and of peaceable assembly. playing point-and-shoot video games in public places, i think, constitutes none of these.
one could, of course, argue that playing video games, like burning draft cards or contributing to a political campaign, is a form of speech and therefore protected. but in order for an action to be a form of speech, i would think that the person performing the action would be trying to communicate something. i don't know if i speak for everyone, but when i play games, i'm just trying to have fun, not make any kind of political statement. (of course, if this law should pass...)
really, i agree with everyone else that this is a dumb law that encourages parental irresponsibility, but i really can't see any constitutional (especially first-amendment) grounds to oppose it on.
i work as a neural modeler at a lab in a major university. we keep several "general purpose hackers" in the lab for things like optimizing our modeling code, making new random number generators, etc. here are some of the ways that our director recruits these folks:
-- he gives talks at 300-level cs classes and sees who shows up after class
-- he sends out a letter to the incoming students that have been chosen for the university's presigious scholarship programs in the fall (since if these people program, they're more likely to do it well)
hope this helps...
and what are the units? functions? lines of code? files?
funny, i'd always thought that the purpose of hardware, in the abstract, was to enable users to do things, but it seems like more and more, the purpose of hardware design in consumer machines is to restrict, or at least have a strong influence on, what the user does with his machine. just say no to copy-controlled drives and internet buttons on my keyboard and the windows key and whatever else forces me to think the way the corporations want me to.
I've had the pleasure of working with the network at a large university in Virginia, home of the Responsible Computing policy and a pretty-much laissez-faire policing system.
Ground rule (and pretty much the only one I've seen): Do what you want, but don't affect other users' access to the system and IT won't bother you.
Students can run whatever kind of servers they want out of their rooms, and they're not behind any kind of firewall. On top of that, the staff have no access to account information unless it's to add/remove, or reset a password to let someone in.
This obviously opens a lot of doors, but the University counters that with an instant termination policy. You start taking up 20% of the University's bandwith and they cut off your connection. You set up your own DHCP server, and they cut off your connection.
Let's hear it for Live and Let Live
>Well, actually, in the US, there are people who live that way:
The Amish.
For those of you who are interested in learning more than what the Times gives, the full write-up is in this week's Nature (free registration required). I would link to it, but the way they have their CGI stuff set up complicates things. To find it, go to Nature's website, then follow the Contents link on the right, then go to this week's magazine; the article is titled "Neural engineering: Real brains for real robots", it's in the News and Views section, and it starts on page 305. Happy reading....
If anyone has a MacOS (7-X) system up and running already and wants some tools right now, they can follow the instructions from MacAddict on how to copy the Darwin versions of g++ and company over to MacOS. For those interested in other BSD apps on OS X, keep an eye on MacAddict's Ports page.
I think we need to contract our focus here: in reading Gelerenter's manifesto, think about the UI rather than the underlying machines. What Gelerenter is proposing is a new way of interacting with the machines we have; a way of making human-machine interation more intuitive for the average user. To a user, accessing a document by asking for "that picture I took of my kids last sunday at the lake" rather than "kidpic.jpg" is as big a leap as asking for "kidpic.jpg" instead of "0:3:0x45FF3F2". What Gelerenter wants is a computer that's not a computer. He wants a computer that thinks for him, that sorts the files he inputs in a way that's closer to the way his mind sorts them than to the way his mind tells his filing cabinet to sort them. He wants to throw out a hierarchical structure in favor of a distributed structure based on content. When I try to see the type of organization that Gelerenter describes, I visualize something like a Visual Thesaurus, with directories being replaced by abstract nodes, eg "lake", "kids", "photos", and files being appropriately connected t o those nodes through their content. Yes, this can be achived through links and directories, but what Gelerenter wants is something to do it for him, something that will organize a filesystem for the average user. So despite all his anti-Linux hndwaving, what Gelerenter really wants isn't a whole new paradigm, but just a whole new UI. A UI that thinks for the user so that (s)he doesn't have to.