The Middle Ages weren't the Dark Ages
on
The Renaissance
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· Score: 3
The Roman Empire fell in the West about 500 AD (probably because of the Black Death). The Dark Ages followed, but after say 1066 Europe entered an era of unprecedented economic growth and technological development.
Contrary to popular belief, European civilisation was vastly farther in 1200 than in say 300. The Romans didn't even have real plows, let alone stirrups, wind and (good) watermills, buttons, and more other basic technologies than are worth mentioning here.
The next crash came in 1348 (the Black Death again). The Renaissance didn't come from nowhere, it was solidly based on three thousand years of steady European growth.
Obviously the Roman Empire was a high point, but just as an example, Slavic Celtic and Germanic languages (including the ancestors of English) begin being written in the late ages of Rome. The rest is history.
Here's a little list of organisms which don't occur in nature and whose production are no doubt dangerous to the ecology:
dogs (ever watch a terrier shake a rat?)
cats (they eat millions of birds every year, and birds eat bugs)
maize (corn)
yeast (there are more kinds than you can imagine)
wheat
rice
tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tobacco and other nightshades (their spread also spread genes for producing all kinds of deadly substances)
starlings (introduced to N Am because they appear in Shakespeare)
horses (will compete with the buffalo when we're gone, but on the other hand horses are originally American aren't they?)
dandilions (introduced on the Mayflower but proved uncultivatable)
just kidding... actually the idea of ecological equilibrium is an illusion caused by the brevity of human life...
Serious about ecology? cut subsidies to farmers and tax unroofed parking lots. I spent my youth helping my father with the breeding bird census and I can testify that loss of habitat, not introduction of new species, is the prob
Was won by Herr Einstein, which suggests he must have studied it.
Britannica.com sez "Physics, in its modern sense, was founded in the mid-19th century as a synthesis of several older sciences--namely, those of mechanics, optics, acoustics, electricity, magnetism, heat, and the physical properties of matter."
God I hope Doonesbury was kidding.
The geeky German magazine, c't, has a more detailed story but it's in German.
According to ct, the key issue is that Microsoft claimed that the strategy of selling software at two different prices was necessary to protect their copyright from pirates, but the court ruled that the stategy wasn't "necessary and worthy of protection".
Microsoft has been suing small dealers in Germany that have never entered any agreement with Microsoft for years. There are a lot of pending cases.
The court regards the strategy to be a method of promoting Microsoft's products, and in general there is no legal protection in Germany for manufacturers to sell products at different prices to different market segments.
German law does allow software companies to restrict the use of the software they have sold in some ways. For example, you can't resell single seat licences as network licences even if you don't have contract with the manufacturer. The court decided that the OEM licence wasn't fundamentally different than the normal licence, so this rule doesn't apply.
Two remarks from me: First, the ruling won't be published for weeks, so no one knows how the lawyers will react, and second, although this is the German Supreme Court (more or less) Germany has a myriad of competition laws ranging from the emminently reasonable to the mind-bogglingly stupid, and the EU is hacking away at all of them even as I write, so this may not be the final word.
Yeah, I do... If you spent any time in Tawan, Korea or Chinese coastal cities in the 80's and then came back in the nineties you'd probably know what I mean... It all looks totally Japanese.
What I was thinking about specifically was the way girls and young women have gotten more and more babyish and cutsey in Japan and how it's spreading all over. They're all carrying fluffy bunnies to work nowadays.
Also the way fashion and consumerism are dominated by those same women.
Check out the Japanese Yahoo for zillions of examples of personal web pages full of anime fluffy bunnies etc.
Apple sells complete systems. Microsoft leveraged the power of the Taiwanese computer industry to get cheap hardware for its OS. Apple wanted too much and lost almost everything.
IBM machines have always been cheaper than Apples and thus more attractive to consumers. Microsoft only squeezes you on the software side, and leaves the hardware to someone else.
Microsoft's sales efforts have been the best propaganda the computer industry ever had. No other software company (except maybe Borland) really ever pushed so hard to get computer products into the hands of consumers.
I firmly believe that if Microsoft's aggressive tactics hadn't been used by someone, there would be a lot fewer computers out there right now.
Yeah, you're right. And it's a typical MS Problem. VB is a great example. I probably should have said "I object to the phrase 'dumbing down' as it is used here".
The difference between the Internet and other media is the large number of data sources on the Internet. Mass media propaganda works in an environment like the one I experienced in Czeckslovakia twenty years ago, where the radio in the hotel room had a single knob for the on/off function and the volume, and that was it, No tuner.
As China get richer, it will no doubt follow the Japanese pattern (all East Asia is turning Japanese) where every night at 9:30 millions of teenage girls email each other on the mobiles to say "good night sweet dreams", almost bringing the telecoms infrastructure to its knees.
Imagine the bureaucracy you'd need to censor all that stuff.
What nanotech does is blur the distinction between software and "real" things.
Nanotech monsters of various descriptions will be produced by script kiddies as soon as the technology advances far enough.
Foresight's documunt is about as useful a reminder that it's not a Good Thing to create "I LOVE YOU" thingies, or orchestrate denial of service attacks.
I particularly object to the phrase "dumbing down". It confuses the user with the system. All users need a smart system to hide the functional details of the parts of the system they only want to use as services. This "functional abstraction" is what makes computers useful at all.
If you think you don't need functional abstraction, then the system you use has been so successful you're ignorant of its real complexity.
Linux could still be a lot easier to use, especially if it want to be on normal desktops. Microsoft, whatever its failings, has implemented a lot of good interface ideas in Windows. Using them will make it easier for users to switch away from Windows. (You know, embrace, extend...)
If a commercial venture like Corel can get Linux onto lots of desktops then it's a win for the open source movement. It may have to hijack KDE to do so, but would it really be a loss? Isn't the real goal of the KDE project to "dumb down" Linux anyway?
Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of particles exclusively in terms of a "psi function". The square of the psi function (imagine something like p2(x,y,z,t)) is the probability that a particle is a certain place at a certain time. It's referred to as the psi squared function.
But the theory only provides the probability. Obviously, when you look at the thing, you figure out where it is.
There are various interpretations of this. One is wierder than the next - my favorite is the idea that a new parallel universe is created for each possible observation, and each universe is identical except that the observer saw something else. But this is regarded as a little uneconomical, as you end up with a LOT of inherently unobservable universes (whatever a universe is). I swear I'm not inventing this.
But anyway, once you've seen the thing, the probability that it is where it is is one, and the probability that it is where it ain't is zero, so your psi squared function "collapses" to a boring function that is zero everywhere but one point, where it's one.
Please note that changing the psi squared function (obviously) changes the psi function too, and (as I already said) that quantum mechanics describes particles exclusively in terms of their psi functions. This means that every observation inevitably changes the particle itself.
If you can figure out exactly what makes the psi function collapse you get a Nobel Prize. Unless of course you're a grad student - then your professor does.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a related but different idea.
Ants don't have lungs, and rely on little air passages that passively circulate air. It won't work for you and me because most of human tissue is much to far from the surface.
>>focusing solely on weight
The strength of a muscle is proportional to the area of its cross section, and thus to the square of its length, but its weight is proportional to its volume, and thus to the cube of its length. (Of course the proportion will be different, but that doesn't matter.)
Galilleo noticed this some time ago when he remarked that when a tree forks, the sum of the cross sectional areas of the tines is equal to the cross sectional area of the original stem.
The question is not how heavy the weight lifter is, it's how thick his legs are. Think if how thin an ants legs are. It won't scale.
See u.a. Diatoms to Dinosaurs : The Size and Scale of Living Things by Christopher McGowan for more detailed information.
If it really is true that the software industry only accepts young programmers, and they have to work 80 hours a week, then as the industry grows it will tend to reduce the birthrate.
Obviously, working 80 hours a week is not conducive to having babies, and old folks have fewer babies than young folks.
But as the birthrate falls, the population becomes more geriatric, which means that an ever larger proportion of young fertile people will be drawn into the software field, resulting in more falls in the birthrate.
In a few generations, the Earths population will spiral down to zero.
One can only hope that the softeware industry dies from a lack of customers before it wipes us all out!!
I think the guys are heros. This is one open source project that could potentially "eat Microsoft's lunch" as Bill Gates would put it. You know embrace, extend....
POOR people reproduce more quickly than RICH people, but I don't think dumb people reproduce more than smart people.
I've never noticed and strong correlation between intelligence and wealth, except to note that almost all European aristocrats (who've been rich for many generations) seem to suffer from half-wittedness.
I live in Central Europe, one of the world's major population centers, and the population is crashing. The UN says it will be down by a third by 2050. It's also very affluent. I seriously doubt people are any smarter here than they are in fast growing Africa though.
I studied linguistics and developed an oddball theory about why people are smart - it's a sexual display, like a baboon's ass (or a peacock's feathers).
I also think people can walk on there hind legs so they can dance, and talk so they can sing or chat up the girls.
People are hairless so you can see how many parasites they harbor - it serves the same purpose as a turkey wattle.
By pure coincidence, some of these sexual displays (not the hairlessness) are useful for inventing steam calliopes and Visual Basic and stuff like that. That's what makes us different from peacocks.
Robots will replace us if and only if some odball trait of theirs makes it possible. Hard to guess what that might be though. Sexual selection seems unlikely.
The less likely it is that a virus can reproduce before it gets zapped, the nicer it has to be to its host. As vigilance increases in the Windows world (but not in the Linux world) widespread Windows viruses will tend to become more benign.
This is a result of the fact that there are so many Windows installations around. Contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of benign bacteria and viruses around. Hotmail is a graet example. In fact, they even brag about their "viral marketing".
In fact the placenta, which provides mammal fetuses with nutrients, is only possible because it is infested with endoviruses that are more or less identical to HIV. These viruses suppress the immune reaction of the mother, which would otherwise kill the baby in short order. The original infection probably occurred about 120m years ago, when the dinosaurs were still alive.
There are plenty of other less benign bugs out there (no one really knows how many, and it depends how you count) that survive by keeping a low profile.
The disadvantage to being benign is that you may have mutant cousins that reproduce more quickly than you by disregarding the interests of the host.
Contrarywise, making it easier for a virus to spread increases its virulence; for example, the fact that babies are born in big hospitals actually causes baby diseases to become more deadly - because the diseases can get away with killing their hosts in short order and then spreading. The diseases evolve to adapt to the novel situation.
In the computer world this means that the funnier the jokes are about viruses seem to fans of a given OS, the rarer but more dangerous they are likely to be. (If they're not rare, they're not funny, but they're also not so dangerous, because security holes get patched.)
Every first post guy is a virus writer looking for but seldom finding an easy opportunity, and there's no lack of first posters. So it must be harder to spread viruses from Linux to Linux than from Windows to Windows
Is this proof of the superiority of Linux to Windows? No. It says more about the topology of the Windows world compared to that of the Linux world. Windows people are simply better connected, because there's more of them.
I myself have developed the perfect defence against viruses. Nothing that I do on the computer is of any value whatsoever, so I have nothing to lose. "Who steals my wallet steals trash" as Shakespeare put it. This may not work for everybody.
Linux is doomed to have a huge virus problem if any bridge is created to the windows world, just like the Native Americans were devastated by European diseases. There is no defence: the feedback loops don't exist, so the defences will never come into being. If I were to call on all Linux users to work together to create a defence against the coming threat, everyone would laugh.
...don't for a minute mistake it for any kind of real genero[u]sity on the part of contributors.
I don't think the point to open sourcing is to prove anyone's generosity. That's potlatch you're thinking of. I'd say criticizing anyone for open sourcing his software is pretty far out of line.
If I write some software, I sure wouldn't want people (who DIDN'T write it)nagging me about which terms I make the source available to them. No one has a right to my code. I wrote it.
The open source movement is exactly like any other economic model - it's only ever going to work as long as the participants regard it as being in their own interest to participate. Generosity has nothing to do with it. And open source is winning because it works for everyone, not because people are suddenly getting nicer.
Just off hand, I can think an excellent application for open source dying software - education. For example, a quick glance at the terms suggests to me that you could use the code as an example in a book about programming.
I have developed a simple algorithm for this which doesn't require any AI - don't read any daily news, just weekly stuff. I don't think there's much of a market for AI in searches as long as there's so many folks out there searching for free. Basically, slashdot is even cheaper than free since I guess that people who get their remarks publish here gain some satisfaction from it, making slashdot even more popular. It's hard to compete with those prices, which is why Linux is better software than just about any commercial competitor.
Keeping track of what people do isn't so revolutionary either, since supermarkets have been analyzing barcode data since the seventies without much AI. My guess would be that routing is an area where AI could play a roll. Traffic patterns tend to be chaotic, and AI might be the right thing. But it's sort of off subject. There's a company called Artificial Life that offers bankers AI bots to bankers to guess the stock market, but that's a little off topic as well. AI will do better predicting mass phenomena (market prices, traffic)than it will finding things or guessing what individuals are up to.
The real problem is that the decision how to clock the CPU is made by the marketing department, not the engineering department. The difference between the chips which are clocked differently is really only one of quality. The good ones don't heat up as much at higher speeds. Wouldn't it be a funny coincidence if a foundry just happened to produce the same quantity of each quality that the marketing guys think they need? The real irony is that the chip makers suffer from the fact that their quality is too good, so they downgrade a lot of their production. The reason that it's so easy to fake chips is that they all come off the same assembly line. The measures to prevent overclocking are all cosmetic.
"Convincing the hardware makers will be the difficult part." Maybe not. I confess complete ignorance of the product in question, but I bet it wasn't built in a factory owned by a company called 3Com. Furthermore, the firmware (that's what we're really talking about) may very well have been outsourced as well, or just bought off the shelf. The best kept secret of the computer industry is that there are almost no American "hardware makers" at all. They're all just marketing companies. Most of the stuff Cisco sells, for example, never physically touches a Cisco employee during its entire lifetime. And Compaq stuff is sometimes triple or quadruple subcontracted. Their big factory in Austin is run by FIC, and in Germany they produce in the old East German Robotron factory. Tatung produces all European HP PCs in Holland, and the printer are make by Selectronics in Hungary. Ect. Networking products are especially prone to be out sourced. Go to a big computer fair and visit the Taiwanese stands and just ask who really produces what. You'd be surprised. Some companies just label complete products, some insist upon design changes, some do their own firmware development, but almost nobody with a recognizeable brand name goes out and actually makes their own PCBs (drilling holes in plastic -that's a Chinese job, as they say) let alone squabbling with the foundry sales guys about allocation. There is a sort of apartheid in the computer business, mostly because the sophistication of the Asian side has increased so quickly. Maybe the open source community could help overcome it. I'm always suprised how people with the technical savvy of the average slashdot reader can be so ignorant of where the stuff really comes from. The trick would be to find out who really designed the hardware in question and to contact him directly. In exchange for other freebies, they might be more than willing to talk.
It's not just that Sterling failed to predict Iridium'S problems. He writes "Iridium is the single greatest debacle in communications history." Actually, the early attempts at laying transatlantic cable were probably worse. So Sterling also misses Iridium'S historical significance (or lack thereof) in his complaints. Not one of his better efforts.
How can you say GSM failed to catch on in a meaningful way? I use all over the place in Europe, and so do tens of millions of other people. The Czeck Republic has 2 subscribers per 5 inhabitants, although less than 10% of households even had phones in the eighties. And GSM is still spreading fast.
Maybe the Patent Office should publish this type of patent submission in the Internet and invite comment. I'm sure that would save the government a lot of money and improve the quality of the patenting process. And after all, "patent" means "open".
I was thinking about the assemblers that Drexler talks about. I had forgotten his word.
Isn't the universe itself interesting enough?
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
There is not only no hidden spirituality in physics, I can't help wonder why anyone who's interested in physics looks for God there. I remember sitting in third grade in a Catholic school hearing the nuns saying "Just look at that sunset...Isn't that proof of the existence of God?" and thinking "Well not really, no. And anyway, if you really like the sunset, why do you need to get metaphysical about it? It's beside the point." My attitude hasn't changed. Take the number 142857. Multiply it by 2,3,4,5,6 or 7. Cool huh? And the number 37037. Multiply it by your favorite 1 digit number, and the result by 3. Nice party trick. See the connection? My new telephone number starts with 91, so I spaced out on that for a half an hour today, and it's a really simple number game. Today I also explained to my four year old son how to tell the difference between a bee and a fly. (Bees have four wings, and they sting if you catch them, as my sister points out) I also thought about Java Collections (far from God, believe me) for some time. In a few decades I'll be senile or dead. At this rate I'll never get around to thinking about God. I'm too interested in the world. No doubt I'll burn in hell for this
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to popular belief, European civilisation was vastly farther in 1200 than in say 300. The Romans didn't even have real plows, let alone stirrups, wind and (good) watermills, buttons, and more other basic technologies than are worth mentioning here.
The next crash came in 1348 (the Black Death again). The Renaissance didn't come from nowhere, it was solidly based on three thousand years of steady European growth.Obviously the Roman Empire was a high point, but just as an example, Slavic Celtic and Germanic languages (including the ancestors of English) begin being written in the late ages of Rome. The rest is history.
dogs (ever watch a terrier shake a rat?)
cats (they eat millions of birds every year, and birds eat bugs)
maize (corn)
yeast (there are more kinds than you can imagine)
wheat
rice
tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tobacco and other nightshades (their spread also spread genes for producing all kinds of deadly substances)
starlings (introduced to N Am because they appear in Shakespeare)
horses (will compete with the buffalo when we're gone, but on the other hand horses are originally American aren't they?)
dandilions (introduced on the Mayflower but proved uncultivatable)
just kidding... actually the idea of ecological equilibrium is an illusion caused by the brevity of human life...
Serious about ecology? cut subsidies to farmers and tax unroofed parking lots. I spent my youth helping my father with the breeding bird census and I can testify that loss of habitat, not introduction of new species, is the prob
Was won by Herr Einstein, which suggests he must have studied it. Britannica.com sez "Physics, in its modern sense, was founded in the mid-19th century as a synthesis of several older sciences--namely, those of mechanics, optics, acoustics, electricity, magnetism, heat, and the physical properties of matter." God I hope Doonesbury was kidding.
According to ct, the key issue is that Microsoft claimed that the strategy of selling software at two different prices was necessary to protect their copyright from pirates, but the court ruled that the stategy wasn't "necessary and worthy of protection".
Microsoft has been suing small dealers in Germany that have never entered any agreement with Microsoft for years. There are a lot of pending cases.
The court regards the strategy to be a method of promoting Microsoft's products, and in general there is no legal protection in Germany for manufacturers to sell products at different prices to different market segments.
German law does allow software companies to restrict the use of the software they have sold in some ways. For example, you can't resell single seat licences as network licences even if you don't have contract with the manufacturer. The court decided that the OEM licence wasn't fundamentally different than the normal licence, so this rule doesn't apply.
Two remarks from me: First, the ruling won't be published for weeks, so no one knows how the lawyers will react, and second, although this is the German Supreme Court (more or less) Germany has a myriad of competition laws ranging from the emminently reasonable to the mind-bogglingly stupid, and the EU is hacking away at all of them even as I write, so this may not be the final word.
What I was thinking about specifically was the way girls and young women have gotten more and more babyish and cutsey in Japan and how it's spreading all over. They're all carrying fluffy bunnies to work nowadays.
Also the way fashion and consumerism are dominated by those same women.
Check out the Japanese Yahoo for zillions of examples of personal web pages full of anime fluffy bunnies etc.
IBM machines have always been cheaper than Apples and thus more attractive to consumers. Microsoft only squeezes you on the software side, and leaves the hardware to someone else.
Microsoft's sales efforts have been the best propaganda the computer industry ever had. No other software company (except maybe Borland) really ever pushed so hard to get computer products into the hands of consumers.
I firmly believe that if Microsoft's aggressive tactics hadn't been used by someone, there would be a lot fewer computers out there right now.
Of course, that's no reason not to break it up.
As China get richer, it will no doubt follow the Japanese pattern (all East Asia is turning Japanese) where every night at 9:30 millions of teenage girls email each other on the mobiles to say "good night sweet dreams", almost bringing the telecoms infrastructure to its knees.
Imagine the bureaucracy you'd need to censor all that stuff.
Nanotech monsters of various descriptions will be produced by script kiddies as soon as the technology advances far enough.
Foresight's documunt is about as useful a reminder that it's not a Good Thing to create "I LOVE YOU" thingies, or orchestrate denial of service attacks.
If you think you don't need functional abstraction, then the system you use has been so successful you're ignorant of its real complexity.
Linux could still be a lot easier to use, especially if it want to be on normal desktops. Microsoft, whatever its failings, has implemented a lot of good interface ideas in Windows. Using them will make it easier for users to switch away from Windows. (You know, embrace, extend...)
If a commercial venture like Corel can get Linux onto lots of desktops then it's a win for the open source movement. It may have to hijack KDE to do so, but would it really be a loss? Isn't the real goal of the KDE project to "dumb down" Linux anyway?
Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of particles exclusively in terms of a "psi function". The square of the psi function (imagine something like p2(x,y,z,t)) is the probability that a particle is a certain place at a certain time. It's referred to as the psi squared function.
But the theory only provides the probability. Obviously, when you look at the thing, you figure out where it is.
There are various interpretations of this. One is wierder than the next - my favorite is the idea that a new parallel universe is created for each possible observation, and each universe is identical except that the observer saw something else. But this is regarded as a little uneconomical, as you end up with a LOT of inherently unobservable universes (whatever a universe is). I swear I'm not inventing this.
But anyway, once you've seen the thing, the probability that it is where it is is one, and the probability that it is where it ain't is zero, so your psi squared function "collapses" to a boring function that is zero everywhere but one point, where it's one.
Please note that changing the psi squared function (obviously) changes the psi function too, and (as I already said) that quantum mechanics describes particles exclusively in terms of their psi functions. This means that every observation inevitably changes the particle itself.
If you can figure out exactly what makes the psi function collapse you get a Nobel Prize. Unless of course you're a grad student - then your professor does.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a related but different idea.
>>focusing solely on weight
The strength of a muscle is proportional to the area of its cross section, and thus to the square of its length, but its weight is proportional to its volume, and thus to the cube of its length. (Of course the proportion will be different, but that doesn't matter.)
Galilleo noticed this some time ago when he remarked that when a tree forks, the sum of the cross sectional areas of the tines is equal to the cross sectional area of the original stem.
The question is not how heavy the weight lifter is, it's how thick his legs are. Think if how thin an ants legs are. It won't scale.
See u.a. Diatoms to Dinosaurs : The Size and Scale of Living Things by Christopher McGowan for more detailed information.
Obviously, working 80 hours a week is not conducive to having babies, and old folks have fewer babies than young folks.
But as the birthrate falls, the population becomes more geriatric, which means that an ever larger proportion of young fertile people will be drawn into the software field, resulting in more falls in the birthrate.
In a few generations, the Earths population will spiral down to zero.
One can only hope that the softeware industry dies from a lack of customers before it wipes us all out!!
I've never noticed and strong correlation between intelligence and wealth, except to note that almost all European aristocrats (who've been rich for many generations) seem to suffer from half-wittedness.
I live in Central Europe, one of the world's major population centers, and the population is crashing. The UN says it will be down by a third by 2050. It's also very affluent. I seriously doubt people are any smarter here than they are in fast growing Africa though.
I studied linguistics and developed an oddball theory about why people are smart - it's a sexual display, like a baboon's ass (or a peacock's feathers).
I also think people can walk on there hind legs so they can dance, and talk so they can sing or chat up the girls.
People are hairless so you can see how many parasites they harbor - it serves the same purpose as a turkey wattle.
By pure coincidence, some of these sexual displays (not the hairlessness) are useful for inventing steam calliopes and Visual Basic and stuff like that. That's what makes us different from peacocks.
Robots will replace us if and only if some odball trait of theirs makes it possible. Hard to guess what that might be though. Sexual selection seems unlikely.
The less likely it is that a virus can reproduce before it gets zapped, the nicer it has to be to its host. As vigilance increases in the Windows world (but not in the Linux world) widespread Windows viruses will tend to become more benign.
This is a result of the fact that there are so many Windows installations around. Contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of benign bacteria and viruses around. Hotmail is a graet example. In fact, they even brag about their "viral marketing".In fact the placenta, which provides mammal fetuses with nutrients, is only possible because it is infested with endoviruses that are more or less identical to HIV. These viruses suppress the immune reaction of the mother, which would otherwise kill the baby in short order. The original infection probably occurred about 120m years ago, when the dinosaurs were still alive.
There are plenty of other less benign bugs out there (no one really knows how many, and it depends how you count) that survive by keeping a low profile.
The disadvantage to being benign is that you may have mutant cousins that reproduce more quickly than you by disregarding the interests of the host.
Contrarywise, making it easier for a virus to spread increases its virulence; for example, the fact that babies are born in big hospitals actually causes baby diseases to become more deadly - because the diseases can get away with killing their hosts in short order and then spreading. The diseases evolve to adapt to the novel situation.
In the computer world this means that the funnier the jokes are about viruses seem to fans of a given OS, the rarer but more dangerous they are likely to be. (If they're not rare, they're not funny, but they're also not so dangerous, because security holes get patched.)
Every first post guy is a virus writer looking for but seldom finding an easy opportunity, and there's no lack of first posters. So it must be harder to spread viruses from Linux to Linux than from Windows to Windows
Is this proof of the superiority of Linux to Windows? No. It says more about the topology of the Windows world compared to that of the Linux world. Windows people are simply better connected, because there's more of them.
I myself have developed the perfect defence against viruses. Nothing that I do on the computer is of any value whatsoever, so I have nothing to lose. "Who steals my wallet steals trash" as Shakespeare put it. This may not work for everybody.
Linux is doomed to have a huge virus problem if any bridge is created to the windows world, just like the Native Americans were devastated by European diseases. There is no defence: the feedback loops don't exist, so the defences will never come into being. If I were to call on all Linux users to work together to create a defence against the coming threat, everyone would laugh.
I don't think the point to open sourcing is to prove anyone's generosity. That's potlatch you're thinking of. I'd say criticizing anyone for open sourcing his software is pretty far out of line.
If I write some software, I sure wouldn't want people (who DIDN'T write it)nagging me about which terms I make the source available to them. No one has a right to my code. I wrote it.
The open source movement is exactly like any other economic model - it's only ever going to work as long as the participants regard it as being in their own interest to participate. Generosity has nothing to do with it. And open source is winning because it works for everyone, not because people are suddenly getting nicer.
Just off hand, I can think an excellent application for open source dying software - education. For example, a quick glance at the terms suggests to me that you could use the code as an example in a book about programming.
I don't think there's much of a market for AI in searches as long as there's so many folks out there searching for free. Basically, slashdot is even cheaper than free since I guess that people who get their remarks publish here gain some satisfaction from it, making slashdot even more popular. It's hard to compete with those prices, which is why Linux is better software than just about any commercial competitor.
Keeping track of what people do isn't so revolutionary either, since supermarkets have been analyzing barcode data since the seventies without much AI.
My guess would be that routing is an area where AI could play a roll. Traffic patterns tend to be chaotic, and AI might be the right thing. But it's sort of off subject.
There's a company called Artificial Life that offers bankers AI bots to bankers to guess the stock market, but that's a little off topic as well.
AI will do better predicting mass phenomena (market prices, traffic)than it will finding things or guessing what individuals are up to.
The real problem is that the decision how to clock the CPU is made by the marketing department, not the engineering department. The difference between the chips which are clocked differently is really only one of quality. The good ones don't heat up as much at higher speeds. Wouldn't it be a funny coincidence if a foundry just happened to produce the same quantity of each quality that the marketing guys think they need?
The real irony is that the chip makers suffer from the fact that their quality is too good, so they downgrade a lot of their production. The reason that it's so easy to fake chips is that they all come off the same assembly line. The measures to prevent overclocking are all cosmetic.
"Convincing the hardware makers will be the difficult part."
Maybe not.
I confess complete ignorance of the product in question, but I bet it wasn't built in a factory owned by a company called 3Com. Furthermore, the firmware (that's what we're really talking about) may very well have been outsourced as well, or just bought off the shelf. The best kept secret of the computer industry is that there are almost no American "hardware makers" at all. They're all just marketing companies.
Most of the stuff Cisco sells, for example, never physically touches a Cisco employee during its entire lifetime.
And Compaq stuff is sometimes triple or quadruple subcontracted. Their big factory in Austin is run by FIC, and in Germany they produce in the old East German Robotron factory. Tatung produces all European HP PCs in Holland, and the printer are make by Selectronics in Hungary.
Ect. Networking products are especially prone to be out sourced. Go to a big computer fair and visit the Taiwanese stands and just ask who really produces what. You'd be surprised.
Some companies just label complete products, some insist upon design changes, some do their own firmware development, but almost nobody with a recognizeable brand name goes out and actually makes their own PCBs (drilling holes in plastic -that's a Chinese job, as they say) let alone squabbling with the foundry sales guys about allocation.
There is a sort of apartheid in the computer business, mostly because the sophistication of the Asian side has increased so quickly. Maybe the open source community could help overcome it. I'm always suprised how people with the technical savvy of the average slashdot reader can be so ignorant of where the stuff really comes from.
The trick would be to find out who really designed the hardware in question and to contact him directly. In exchange for other freebies, they might be more than willing to talk.
It's not just that Sterling failed to predict Iridium'S problems. He writes "Iridium is the single greatest debacle in communications history." Actually, the early attempts at laying transatlantic cable were probably worse. So Sterling also misses Iridium'S historical significance (or lack thereof) in his complaints. Not one of his better efforts.
How can you say GSM failed to catch on in a meaningful way? I use all over the place in Europe, and so do tens of millions of other people. The Czeck Republic has 2 subscribers per 5 inhabitants, although less than 10% of households even had phones in the eighties. And GSM is still spreading fast.
Maybe the Patent Office should publish this type of patent submission in the Internet and invite comment. I'm sure that would save the government a lot of money and improve the quality of the patenting process. And after all, "patent" means "open".
I was thinking about the assemblers that Drexler talks about. I had forgotten his word.
There is not only no hidden spirituality in physics, I can't help wonder why anyone who's interested in physics looks for God there.
I remember sitting in third grade in a Catholic school hearing the nuns saying "Just look at that sunset...Isn't that proof of the existence of God?" and thinking "Well not really, no. And anyway, if you really like the sunset, why do you need to get metaphysical about it? It's beside the point."
My attitude hasn't changed. Take the number 142857. Multiply it by 2,3,4,5,6 or 7. Cool huh? And the number 37037. Multiply it by your favorite 1 digit number, and the result by 3. Nice party trick. See the connection? My new telephone number starts with 91, so I spaced out on that for a half an hour today, and it's a really simple number game.
Today I also explained to my four year old son how to tell the difference between a bee and a fly. (Bees have four wings, and they sting if you catch them, as my sister points out) I also thought about Java Collections (far from God, believe me) for some time. In a few decades I'll be senile or dead. At this rate I'll never get around to thinking about God. I'm too interested in the world.
No doubt I'll burn in hell for this